There's a new William Gibson novel! There's a new William Gibson novel!!!

It comes out next month, and I'm putting in for a review copy, like, RIGHT NOW...

Spook Country. Sounds an awful lot like the Xark concept of "Spookworld"... Here's the synopsis, such as it is...

Gibson, in a short promotional video (which is available on his site):

"It's about cultural changes in the United States since (9/11)... The real flavor of real spook country is the flavor of rumor... of 'you heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy'...

"The core of how politics and technology work together for me is that technology is very seldom legislated into existence. Technology will eventually take us to a point where something changes so much, that beyond that point we won't be able to recognize any of it at all, and whatever is left of us, of our species beyond that point, looking back, won't be able to recognize us as being the same species."

Have you noticed how Gibson, a science fiction writer who used to write about futuristic technology, has written both of his last two novels in the present? Is that what happens to science fiction at the moment of The Singularity?

Comments

[jmsloop]

Dan,
I can't find the interview but years ago--when Gibson had just published "Count Zero," the second novel in his first trilogy--he claimed to be working on three trilogies. The first was to be set in the distant future (now completed), the second in a future about 10 years from the present (now completed) and the third in the present (now two books in). So, if he's planned it all along, was he aware of the coming of the moment of the Singularity?

[Daniel]

Probably not. It's probably just me suffering from a case of apophenia.