Man, i love William Gibson’s writing. I can even deal with the 4 -5 year wait for a new one we get these days.
And with Spook Country he’s as on the money as ever.

It’s always the first third I love the most. Wherein he sets up his universe of characters, technologies, corporations etc.

Maybe it’s too much lately thinking about things steampunk, but I kept thinking Gibson was writing about some alternate-present.

Just like Pattern Recognition – the world he paints is very much of the now and makes use of the present’s technology. But it’s a different, cooler world his character’s live in. Just as P.R’s F:F:F could have existed ~2000 (but did largely inspire the creation of ARG‘s).. so could his locative-art scene been all the rage of 2006. I wonder what it will inspire…

Probably something everting – like in this clip:

http://blog.m1k3y.com/flash/flv_demo.swf

Proof of Gibson’s thesis that it’s art and the military that find the uses of new tech.

By writing about the recent past, Gibson also avoids the dangers inherent in trying to predict the future. As the InternetJesus said, on Doktor Sleepless:

I had to rewrite some stuff from the first issue because the present overtook my fiction — my friend Josie Nutter bought a device that allowed her to radio-tag objects. A year earlier, Bruce Sterling had talked about a future where you Google for the location of your shoes in the morning. Today, Josie dials them up on a handset instead. And I had to throw out a page. Hell, I should still lose the page where diagnostic RFIDs are swallowed for medical work, since that’s being prototyped now.

Think i’m gonna re-read P.R. now. Or atleast, the first third…