If Spook Country were a blog it would be Boing Boing. If you’re not aware of it, Boing Boing is subtitled “A directory of wonderful things”. It primarily covers topics that appeal to geeks. Gadgets, intellectual property, fringe art, pranks, institutional fuckups, all the ways real life has become stranger than the strangest science fiction.
So it’s no surprise that Gibson’s SF novel set in the present day reads like a week of Boing Boing. It’s full of the arcana of the collisions between the worlds of art, geolocation, pop culture, and espionage. The protagonist is Hollis Henry, one-time member of a pop punk band, now a freelance journalist. Her job for a new magazine turns out to be something more than she bargained for. Gibson is doing really good work with these last couple of novels that basically take a science fiction sensibility and apply it to a present-day thriller.