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A review by tome15
Spook Country by William Gibson
4.0
Gibson, William. Spook Country. Blue Ant No. 2. Putnam, 2007.
It is fun to read this novel ten or eleven years after it was written, a halcyon time when there was no Trumpian bullying, no Fake News industry, and no open Russian collusion in American politics; it was also a time when the dream of net neutrality that gave some people hope that electronic freedom was not an oxymoron. The novel certainly has its flaws. The three-ring circus of a plot takes too long to come together and when it does, it leaves me thinking, all that for just this? But then, that may be Gibson’s point. When former rock stars writing for magazines no one reads and drug-addicted loners who sporadically fight against Big Brother, who may not be Big Brother at all but just an ordinary thug, represent pop culture’s everyman, then maybe the loss of personal identity involved in the postmodern condition could be our salvation. If everyone is a celebrity, no one is, and that may be what saves us from the Mongolian Death Worm—Gibson’s symbol for the Nemesis that is everywhere in modern life. One detail I like: the loner protagonist is named Milgrim, recalling the 1960s Milgrim experiment that demonstrated that more than half us could be talked into hurting others by fast-talking guys pretending to be scientists and educators.
It is fun to read this novel ten or eleven years after it was written, a halcyon time when there was no Trumpian bullying, no Fake News industry, and no open Russian collusion in American politics; it was also a time when the dream of net neutrality that gave some people hope that electronic freedom was not an oxymoron. The novel certainly has its flaws. The three-ring circus of a plot takes too long to come together and when it does, it leaves me thinking, all that for just this? But then, that may be Gibson’s point. When former rock stars writing for magazines no one reads and drug-addicted loners who sporadically fight against Big Brother, who may not be Big Brother at all but just an ordinary thug, represent pop culture’s everyman, then maybe the loss of personal identity involved in the postmodern condition could be our salvation. If everyone is a celebrity, no one is, and that may be what saves us from the Mongolian Death Worm—Gibson’s symbol for the Nemesis that is everywhere in modern life. One detail I like: the loner protagonist is named Milgrim, recalling the 1960s Milgrim experiment that demonstrated that more than half us could be talked into hurting others by fast-talking guys pretending to be scientists and educators.