Spook Country by William Gibson, 2007

A '90s indie-music star enters the 21st century as a freelance journalist working on a piece about locative art, interviewing a Los Angeles artist who uses augmented reality to restage famous deaths. No one has heard of the magazine she's working for, a Belgian start-up headquartered in London knocking off Wired magazine. Meanwhile, a family of Chinese-Cuban subversives deliver iPods containing data in and around New York City. The family has an occluded past, and is steeped in helpful spiritualism. The family's activities are being tracked by what may be agents of the state, although their provenance is sketchy. Because the subversives text in an obscure Russian-adjacent language, the agents kidnap a drug-addicted translator, and it is from his point of view the agents' part of the story is told. Spook Country tightens these three threads into a knot around the story's almost a McGuffin: one of my favorite minor episodes from the second Gulf War.

Spook Country is the middle of the Blue Ant trilogy, succeeding Pattern Recognition and preceding Zero History. It's got Gibson's disassociative cool, particularly with respect to boutique hotels, and constant forward amble even when people are sitting in a parking lot talking. Because the story is set in 2006, the fun of looking for skies the color of television tuned to a dead channel in Gibson novels has been replaced by nostalgia in recognizing details (“She closed her eyes and clamshelled her phone.”), although it’s fun to note that, given the augmented realities, Spook Country was published the same year Apple released the first iPhone.

Not having to describe future cyberpunk dystopias seems to have loosened Gibson’s writing. He has a Lego joke at the beginning of the story, and another, non-Lego joke preceding a Union Square rumble. He even writes a subtle and surprising sex scene at the end. On the other hand, maybe Gibson's a little too loose. The spiritualism shades close to exoticism (“And the Vietnamese rising like that smoke in the twilight, and as quickly, his limbs not so much moving as insinuating themselves into different and constantly changing relationships with the wall.” There’s a lot of this spiritual parkour — “systema” — in the story, Gibson leans heavily on it.). However, despite the illusory and other-worldly occurrences, Spook Country interrogates some kind of post-9/11 America. The story sweeps along with enough hooks to carry the inconclusive ending, which does little more than bring to mind Guy Grand making it hot for them.