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July 17, 2008 by Node Magazine.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with William Gibson, author of the books “Neuromancer” and “Spook Country,” about where we are headed in this post-internet age [via IT Conversations]
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June 12, 2008 by Node Magazine.
Cool i09 interview with William Gibson re: Godzilla, draft-dodging and the novel he has always wanted to write [thanks to grave_danger1969].
In Spook Country, old ideologies hang around and shape the initial phases of a longterm change that it will never be able to keep up with. The digital realm is inherently porous. These days we’re all coming to the attention of the authorities as a matter of course. But the really new thing is that the authorities are coming to our attention. It’s more difficult for authorities to keep their secrets. it’s working both ways. We live in the era of the leak, the document that doesn’t get wiped off the hard drive. That drive you thought was wiped shows up in a pawn shop in Vegas. It’s equally porous in both directions. But individuals have a better chance of applying transparency to their lives and transactions on the internet than states and corporations do. If we continue in this direction, I believe people in the future will wield unimaginable tools of forensic transparency — and they’ll aim them back at history. They’ll find out about what every major player did all the way back with tools we can’t imagine today. There will be no more lost cities.
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May 30, 2008 by Node Magazine.
The official word on the 2008 Book Tour to support the paperback version of Spook Country [williamgibsonboard]:
SEATTLE - TACOMA, WATuesday, June 36:45 PM arrival7:00 PM to 8:00 PM PSTReading/Q&A/Signing UNIVERSITY BOOKSTORE4326 University Way NESeattle, WA 98105206-633-6443www.bookstore.washington.edu_______________________________________________________________________PORTLAND, ORWednesday, June 46:15 PM arrival6:30 PM to 8:00 PM PSTReading/Q&A/Signing BARNES & NOBLE #226212000 SE 82nd AvePortland, OR 97266503-786-3464_______________________________________________________________________SAN FRANCISCO, CAMonday, June 96:45 PM arrival7:00 PM to 8:00 PM PSTReading/Signing BORDERS BOOKS & MUSIC #57400 Post StreetSan Francisco, CA 94102415-399-1633_______________________________________________________________________SAN FRANCISCO, CATuesday, June 107:15 PM arrival7:30 PM to 8:30 PM PSTReading/Signing CAPITOLA BOOK CAFE1475 41st Ave.Capitola, CA 95010831-462-4415 http://www.capitolabookcafe.com/_______________________________________________________________________AUSTIN, TXWednesday, June 117:15 PM arrival7:30 PM to 8:30 PM CSTDiscussion/Signing BARNES & NOBLE #253610000 Research Blvd., #158Austin, TX 78759(512) 418-8985 _______________________________________________________________________DAYTON, OHThursday, June 126:45 PM arrival7:00 PM to 8:00 PM ESTReading/Signing BOOKS & COMPANY @ The Greene4453 Walnut St.Beavercreek, OH 45440937-429-6302www.booksandco.com_______________________________________________________________________LEXINGTON, KYFriday, June 136:45 PM arrival7:00 PM Reading/Q&A/Signing JOSEPH-BETH 161 Lexington Green Circle, Ste. B1Lexington, KY 40503859-271-5330 _______________________________________________________________________PHILADELPHIA, PASaturday, June 141:45 PM arrival2:00 PM to 3:00 PM ESTReading/Q&A/Signing BARNES & NOBLE #26463535 US Route 1Princeton, NJ 05840609-897-9250_______________________________________________________________________NEW YORK, NYSunday, June 166:45 PM arrival7:00 PM to 8:00 PM ESTUpstairs at the Square with Martha Wainwright! BARNES & NOBLE #267533 East 17th StNew York, NY 10003212-253-0810 _______________________________________________________________________BOSTON, MATuesday, June 1712:45 PM arrival1:00 PM to 2:00 PM ESTReading/Signing BORDERS BOOKS & MUSIC #12010-24 School St.Boston, MA 02108617-557-7188
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November 9, 2007 by Node Magazine.
From William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview [by Andrew Leonard]:
Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn’t cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn’t spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don’t have Wi-Fi.
In a world of superubiquitous computing, you’re not gonna know when you’re on or when you’re off. You’re always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it’s a drag.
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September 19, 2007 by Node Magazine.
Finally, the CBC “Words at Large” Bookclub podcast of William Gibson’s appearance is now available for audio download [link corrected by mi shi]! To my knowledge, this is the first audio interview where Gibson discusses this blog and its sister the Node tumblog.
If you missed the last one of these interviews, you can listen to the 2003 Bookclub audio as well.
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September 15, 2007 by Node Magazine.
Here are a few more reviews of Spook Country [initially courtesy of oddmanrush]:
“The slot in culture that I’m most closely associated with is one in which charlatans declare that they know the future. My job is to sit near that slot and when people approach me I say: ‘Only charlatans say they really know the future.’ I sit near the tent where they give out bullshit and offer people a different sort of dialogue. My role is to raise questions.”
“What we call technology in our science is almost always emergent technology. … They don’t mean the technology we’ve had for 50 years, which has already changed us more than we’re capable of knowing,” he says. “When I say technology, I’m sort of thinking of the whole anthill we’ve been heaping up since we came out of the caves, really.
He begins with a blank slate, he says. When he begins to write, he has no idea of plot, or of who his characters are or even what it is he wants to say. He just sits there, hoping the non-rational will take over. Only then will he begin to write.
“Very slowly, it can be a very slow process. I really do like to keep myself open to the characters and to what is happening. I don’t rule the thing rigidly. My characters, they really rule the whole thing. And their names rule them. They seldom just come to me, the names. And I am just a little reluctant to explain where the names come from, because sometimes I might even be having a joke at someone’s expense.
“Spook Country is the place where we have all landed, few by choice, and where we are learning to live,” he wrote. “The country inside and outside of the skull. The soul, haunted by the past, of what was, of what might have been. The realization that not all forking paths are equal, some go down in value.”
Someone is essentially doing a hypertext version of “Spook Country” at Node magazine, with chapter summaries and various annotations and illustrations.
Yeah, I’ve seen that. The amount of effort involved is a bit scary. The entries I’ve looked at have been remarkably accurate. Oscar Wilde said mirrors and cats are both inherently unhealthy to pay too much attention to, and I think that sort of Web site is in that category for me.
Where did you get Blue Ant and the character Bigend from?
WG: I was having one-on-one meetings very late at night with someone at the London offices of Ridley Scott’s advertising agency. Wandering around making coffee and stuff… It suggested something. It was an interesting space. I’d never been in an advertising agency before. I had this space, and had a company… and then I kind of reverse engineered Bigend out of the company. A lot of what I do in terms of creativity is actualy kind of a reverse engineering… I’ll find a flying saucer, and figure out how the drive works… And then I’ll put it in a Volvo.
We spent nearly four weeks holed up in a ‘houseboat hotel’ floating alongside the banks of Dal Lake with the rest of the press corps. At night we would hear AK-47 fire echoing through the city, and there were constant rumors. Some nights we’d be pulled ashore, with everyone convinced that the militants were planning to drive a motorboat into the hotel and shoot everybody. Sometimes blustering Indian officials would appear, insisting that the militants had killed him or that he was about to be released. The entire ordeal, at least on our end, was conducted through bribery, threats and terse discussions over cups of tea.
- 08-13-07: A 2007 Interview With William Gibson by Scott Rosenberg, NPR
- Space to think by The Observer, Guardian Unlimited
- Book review: ‘Spook Country’ follows complex path of post-9/11 by Claudia Smith Brinson, The State
- Novelist William Gibson tries techno-noir by Scott Eyman, Palm Beach Post Books
- ‘Spook Country’ by William Gibson by Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
- Review: Gibson sees America in ‘Spook Country by Charles Taylor, Newsday
- William Gibson’s ‘Spook Country’ by Matthew Bey, American-Statesman
- New York Time Out by Drew Toal
- William Gibson says reality has become scifi by Belinda Goldsmith, Reuters
- Ideas outshine characters in fast-paced technothriller by Vince Darcangelo, Rocky Mountain News
- Q&A with William Gibson by Clay Evans, Boulder Daily Camera
- Spies, spooks flit about in war on terror by Michael Berry, San Franscisco Gate
- Has Gibson Lost Ability to Terrify Us? by Andrew Rosenblum, New York Observer
- A pattern of change [review for Pattern Recognition] by Chris Packham, The Star
- The dread and the fury: William Gibson delivers an unsparing post-9/11 novel by Bill Sheehan, chron.com
- ‘Spook Country’: A fitful, fast-forward spy tale by Ken Barnes, USA Today
- Spook Country Review by Thomas M. Wagner, SF Reviews
- William Gibson Is Freaking Me Out by Joshua Zachariah Ellis, Zenarchery.com
- OnPoint audio interview with host Tom Ashbrook
My favorite of the new bunch is Regis Behe’s “Author captures world chaos in ‘Spook Country’” [Pittsburgh Tribune Review]:
“In the early ’80s, if we thought about cyberspace at all, it was somewhere very special that we went occasionally,” Gibson says. “But the rest of the time, we were here. What’s happened is the very special place we used to go for adventures has become the here. That’s where a lot of us are, most of the time. It’s a very special place, and kind of the unusual place is becoming the place where we aren’t connected to anything.”
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September 8, 2007 by Node Magazine.
Kevin Broome logs this summary of William Gibson at the CBC Book Club [scheduled to air Saturday September 15, between 8 and 9 a.m. and then available as a podcast on CBC Words At Large on Wednesday September 19].
He tells us of a fan site called Node, named after the under-the-radar magazine that the protagonist is hired by in Spook Country, on which Gibson fans have mapped any and all linkable references found in the pages of the novel. Gibson marvels at the speed that such endeavours can be executed in this day and age. A dozen people, in different times zones, “who are crazy” can achieve enormous things. Gibson describes it as cheap A.I.
And this from Steppin’ Locust on the William Gibson message board:
Seek: NODE online – encyclopedia of Spook Country’s details and marginalia – visual concordance to each googleable reference in the novel - Google is there the way your memory is there – your brain is going to grow into google
We volunteer to become parts of vast distributed intelligences that are fantastically smarter than we are.
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September 6, 2007 by Node Magazine.
Bruce Sterling calls this interview by Joel Garreau for the Washington Post, the one of the best William Gibson interviews ever:
“It’s curious. When I published ‘Pattern Recognition’ ” — his previous book, which was also set in the recent past and achieved mainstream success — “within a few months there was someone who started a Web site. People were compiling Googled references to every term and every place in the book. It has photographs of just about every locale in the book — a massive site that was compiled by volunteer effort. But it took a couple of years to come together.
With ‘Spook Country,’ the same thing was up on the Web before the book was published.” Somebody got an advance reader copy, and instantly put up a site for his fictional Node magazine.
Plus, if you just can’t get enough, there is the story by Michael Janairo about the story by Professor Sutherland about this site and the node tumblog.
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September 1, 2007 by Node Magazine.
This is so spooky, I can’t help but laugh!
Immediately after reading an article on conspiracy theories about Denver International Airport [or “Kansas” as many of us in the Denver area like to call it], I found Node idea, an article by John Suthlerland for Guardian UK about the William Gibson’s “theory of a new and innovatively creative reading practice” floating on a “critical cloud” of fan-promoted literary criticism combating professional neglect and “antibuzz”:
Node-man, a Gibson fan, has duly set up a website with the devotional URL node.tumblr.com. Node-man also got a very early copy of Spook Country. The fan is unidentified: Gibson knows who he is, and says he lives in small-town USA and wants, apparently, to stay anonymous.
Apparently patternboy is now all grown up and hiding underground after mobilising “a volunteer army of fellow enthusiasts” [that would be you, Memetic Engineer] to create a “Google aura” for promoting Spook Country.
What the unknown Node-maestro has done is poles apart, both from this, and from the usual website-based ‘everybody pitch in’ mess. He’s channelled the raw material supplied by his volunteers into a sign-posted route through Spook Country. It opens the way, I believe, to a new kind of critical commentary on texts. One can see, easily enough, how it could be extended to Paradise Lost, or Hamlet.
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August 30, 2007 by Node Magazine.
The Bat Segundo Show has an excellent, original [read = “not the same old questions”] interview [mp3] with William Gibson about his new novel Spook Country and a variety of other topics including:
Coats, blankets, and carapaces in Gibson’s fiction, textures, characters with shaved heads, on not having technological issues, the Apple Store, cell phones and the natural street state, obsolete technology and thrift shops, ZX81s, VR, sitting atop the technological anthill, the internal combustion engine, how to escape being handcuffed with a piece of a ball point pen, the origin of Blue Ant, color taxonomies, Belgians, locative art, rock ‘n roll novels from the 1960s, the downsides of sitting in a SFWA suite, Bobby Chombo, cigarettes, Cory Doctorow, GPS plausibilities, celebrity deaths, Philip K. Dick, Milgram and Dr. Stanley Milgrim, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, ghostly connections between Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, tripartite plot structures, writing while not knowing what was in the suitcase, extra-terrestrial artifacts in Baghdad, how to confuse John Clute, the historical record being determined by Wikipedia and Google results, Google Maps and street view, lonelygirl15, YouTube, Japanese behavioral protocols, responding to Ed Park’s theory about the old man and Win being the same character, unreliable narrators, and Iain Sinclair.
[Thanks to Forbidden Planet and Memetic Engineer for the heads up]
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