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A review by sonicmooks
Spook Country by William Gibson
3.0
While I understood going into it, from the reviews I read when this book first came out, that Spook Country is supposed to be some sort of conceptual novel...setting science fiction in the present (or even recent past) tense...yadda yadda yadda...whatever the case, or conceit...in the end I just found it a bit boring and uninspired.
I've been a fan of Mr. Gibson's for years, but this work just does not seem to be remotely as interesting as his earlier cyber-punk masterpieces, and near masterpieces. It's almost as if in stripping away the cyber-fantasy-world and it's trappings he is left with characters that are rather stale, one dimensional, and...well...boring. Maybe that's the point, and I'm missing it...but this book never really engaged me at all...the characters were nothing more than fleeting sketches...very little depth...and some characters that seemed promising were never allowed to develop and/or were dropped to the background after being used as nothing more that plot transition devices...the plot twists seemed to move away from whatever scenarios that were remotely interesting, choosing instead to follow through on perhaps the most boring story line of the bunch in the end...oh well.
All that said, it was not a horrible book. Just a disappointing one, based on past expectations.
For whatever it's worth, in the form of context, I did enjoy Pattern Recognition, Mr. Gibson's previous novel, a lot. This one, not so much.
-m
I've been a fan of Mr. Gibson's for years, but this work just does not seem to be remotely as interesting as his earlier cyber-punk masterpieces, and near masterpieces. It's almost as if in stripping away the cyber-fantasy-world and it's trappings he is left with characters that are rather stale, one dimensional, and...well...boring. Maybe that's the point, and I'm missing it...but this book never really engaged me at all...the characters were nothing more than fleeting sketches...very little depth...and some characters that seemed promising were never allowed to develop and/or were dropped to the background after being used as nothing more that plot transition devices...the plot twists seemed to move away from whatever scenarios that were remotely interesting, choosing instead to follow through on perhaps the most boring story line of the bunch in the end...oh well.
All that said, it was not a horrible book. Just a disappointing one, based on past expectations.
For whatever it's worth, in the form of context, I did enjoy Pattern Recognition, Mr. Gibson's previous novel, a lot. This one, not so much.
-m