Rather more than twenty years ago, William Gibson exploded on to the science fiction scene with his novel Neuromancer, probably the most successful first novel ever in the history of that genre. It won virtually all the prizes and awards for 1984, and launched and defined the new mode of "cyberpunk" which has dominated SF ever since. It seemed to be the perfect script for the computer revolution which was at that time just about to take off. The new hero of the day was the hacker—invariably young, operating outside and indeed against the massed forces of orthodox business and government, owing his and sometimes her success to mastery of forces and techniques which everyone used but few really understood. A key idea was "cyberspace," the "virtual reality" in which the hackers roamed freely, jacked into their computers, trying to beat the "ice," the Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics with which the banks and the authorities guarded their wealth and their secrets. But the secret of Gibson's success was style: he evolved a way of writing which linked the "cyber" and the "punk," on the one hand the aggressive, allusive, street-smart slang of the young and knowing; on the other, the compressed, high-tech, instruction-manual gibberish which almost all of us have failed at one time or another to cope with. No one ever finished Neuromancer without thinking there was something he hadn't understood. Gibson's book made you fear that you were in reality living within a net of unseen and impalpable forces—as indeed, if you consider electronic environments, we are.

Most of the predictions implied in Gibson's early novels turned out to be wrong. Twenty years later, the world is not dominated by Japanese zaibatsus, and the Asian business model, once viewed with awed respect as representing the wave of the future, has repeatedly turned out to have large financial holes in it. Hackers have had their successes, but they rarely amounted to much, and the real dangers of the computer world turned out to be pettier if more annoying: "spam," "phishing," and "identity theft," none of them significant in the Gibson universe. In fact the world seems to have returned to the grip of the "suits," the boring middle-aged professionals who, it turns out, make money out of smart young things rather than the other way round. The question is, has Gibson got a second shot in his chamber? That is what one wonders as one reads Spook Country.

His new book is arguably not science fiction at all, belonging rather to the mode of techno-thriller, as defined above all by Tom Clancy. Loosely picking up some threads from Gibson's previous novel, Pattern Recognition, it's set very much in the present. It's written in short bursts, no less than 84 chapters averaging fewer than five pages a time, and much of the novel darts without apparent connection between several plot-lines and groups of characters. There's an ex-rock singer, Hollis, who lost her money in dotcoms (Gibson didn't predict that either) and is now a journalist trying to do a feature on Bobby Chombo, who seems to have invented a new form of computer art. There's a kind of ex-Cuban ninja called Tito, whose extended family has connections with both the KGB and CIA. He is being spied on by a grim organization-man called Brown (certainly a code-name), who much to his disgust has to employ a homeless street-kid called Milgrim, because of the latter's ability to read the code the Tito family uses. And there is the vague and ominous presence of Bigend, whose name has to be pronounced Belgian-style (Bijean), whose interests and intentions are obscure, but who keeps reminding the reader that the serious money is now often in Europe, in Switzerland or Luxemburg or maybe Lichtenstein. As in Gibson's previous books, there seems to be no middle class. Characters are either dirt-poor or fantastically rich. Milgrim owns nothing other than the clothes he stands up in—which his keeper proceeds to take away from him, replacing them with cheap mass-produced things known to be bug-free. The only objects he actually values are the overcoat he stole from a deli and the book he found in the pocket of it, a history of medieval messianism. Bigend by contrast has gone through normal luxury and out the other side; his apartment features a bed which floats on air, supported only by magnets (note: do not crawl under it while wearing anything metallic).

Rich or poor, straight or bent, official or counterculture, they're all trying to find something, and given that the something seems to be a seaborne container, and that lead-lined packages and containers figure prominently, the obvious inference is that it's a nuclear device set to go off somewhere like Seattle harbor. Where novels turn on the unexpected answer, reviewers are obligated not to reveal it. Suffice it to say that the answer is indeed unpredictable, though connected with Iraq—but, possibly, something of a let-down. There is a feeling that Gibson does not really have the answers in what one might call the Clancy-universe. Though his characters may express surprise at devices like sky-hooks and rigid inflatables, both are actually pretty familiar, and the final feat Tito the ninja is called in to perform seems well within ordinary capacities.

Still, it will take most readers a long time to figure this out, thanks to the continuingly powerful Gibson smoke-and-mirrors style. Neologisms abound: there's "geohacking," "eeparespatial tagging," "darknets," and "annotated environments" which have been "hyperspatially tagged." Bobby Chombo—who may be the only person who can trace that container—gets his name from a technique which "implements finite difference methods for the solution of partial differential equations, on block-structured, adaptively refined rectangular grids." Oh. So that's why he chalks lines all over the warehouse floor and always sleeps in a different square. A critical, and like "cyberspace" a rather useful new word, is "breakbulk." Freight nowadays is shipped in standard-sized containers, and it's not economical to split up their contents or "break bulk." Bigend explains at one point that information has become rather like that, turning up in large packets which need "data mining." So what may be much more useful is "Traditional human intelligence. Someone knowing something." Anyone who has had to explain their computer problems to a call-center can see the point of that.

In the background, too, are thoroughly non-modern forms of occultism. This too is something which stems from and seems to fit the "cyberpunk" universe, the inhabitants of which tended to think from the start that the real world, or the significant world, was the one inside the computer, the one which did not function in physical space, which was also the world inside their minds. They had in fact become, in a way, creatures of the spirit, who frequently expressed their contempt for the brutal blundering physical world the rest of us live in—as they called it, "the meat." It's not a long way from that sentiment to belief in more traditional spiritual powers, and sure enough, in this novel (as with earlier Gibson characters) Tito thinks he gains his abilities from the voodoo-deities who protect him, whom he calls the Guerreros. Throughout the novel, too, Milgrim is reading his pilfered book about the 12th-century heresy of the Free Spirit, which he connects with modern government agencies as "a secret religion of mutually empowered sociopaths." What is a modern celebrity-figure, asks Bigend, if not a "tulpa," which he explains as a mystic Tibetan term meaning "a projected thought-form," like "cyberspace" itself a consensual mass-hallucination? That's why people keep seeing Elvis.

Not very plausible, one may say. But in a world where other people's wi-fi comes through the walls and cellphone towers keep us all in an electronic net, a world where we are deluged with information, much of it wrong and most of it uncheckable, a world where celebrities are omnipresent but invisible except as pixels—well, there is a case for saying that the occult looks more and more realistic. Those of us still fixated on "the meat," says Bigend, ought to realize that we are the products of a technological window which has lasted less than a hundred years, one feature of which was the strict separation of production and consumption. In pre-modern times, people made their own music, or paid musicians to perform live. In modern times, music is manufactured and sold as tapes and CDs, and there is a case for saying that the musicians are packaged for sale too, pop stars becoming "artifact[s] of preubiquitous media." But as we all know, the record companies are having trouble restricting access to what they used to sell; you don't buy it, you download it. The postmodern Gibson world is one of continuous digitized information transmission, everything from music to money to national security to the soul: it's all just bits and bytes. This isn't a metaphor, Gibson insists. We're all living in "spook country" already, it's just that most of us haven't realized that yet. Maybe this time he's right.

Tom Shippey is Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at St. Louis University. He is the author of J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Houghton Mifflin) and Roots and Branches: Papers on Tolkien (Walking Tree Press).

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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