I was appalled and embarrassed when I walked into the library yesterday and saw on the display table by the front door Spook City, the new novel by William Gibson.

That the patron saint has a new novel and I didn't know six weeks in advance represents a massive failure of my personal intelligence networks. I'm mentioning it here so other dumpshockers aren't caught similarly unaware.

It's setting is contemporary, but the early 21st century is as cyberpunk as the dreams of the 1980s ever were.

Not to burst your personal reality bubble, but it's actually Spook Country

Prepare for additional appall and embarrassment. =)

There's an article SOMEWHERE (looking now) about how he has abandoned cyberpunk. Here it is.

...the title of this thread could make a good campaign idea.

That says he "abandoned trying to predict the future", not that he abandoned cyberpunk. Close, but not the same (though both are true).

The fact he abandoned cyberpunk, as he wrote in in the 80s, is fine, as cyberpunk is totally irrelevant now. Nobody except us desperate fanboys still cling to it. Gibson would be crazy to continue writting cyberpunk.

As to him no longer trying to predict the future because "it's too hard" - I think that's just dumb. It wasn't easier in the 80s. Hell, the future envisionned by cyberpunk mostly did not come to past. So what? It was still awesome. I don't think it's that the future is harder to predict. I think it's Gibson who's lost his willingness to try to.

Yep, I'm a small variety of idiot. The title is Spook Country, not Spook City.

It's been a long 48 hrs.

In my defense, the cover art is a stylized cityscape.

Eh, I think after Idoru and Pattern Recognition, I'm done reading Gibson.

There's nothing wrong with Idoru. And All Tomorrow's Parties is magnificent.

Pattern Recognition blows chunks, though. A novel about a disturbed girl who's daddy went missing on 9/11? Give me a break.

Here's news...however much Gibson is or is no longer cyberpunk, Spook Country features augmented reality.

I'm with Eidolon and Zen on this one. I loved Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties, but after that I just couldn't muster the interest. The man himself still interests me, though, because he has a keen way of looking at things.

I got my pre-ordered copies of Spook Country and Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein yesterday. I dived into Crooked Little Vein first, though, since I'm in a more warped frame of mind currently.

Not sure how with me you are. I thought both of those sucked.

Disclaimer: I understand fully that this is 100% subjective. I will not engage in an e-debate over opinions regarding fiction or its author.

That out of the way, I thought Idoru smacked of Gibson trying so hard to be Gibson that he over Gibsoned it to the point of the book being too Gibson. Pattern Recognition just bored me to tears, and wasn't remotely the type of work that I previously read Gibson for.

If someone that I trusted for book opinions told me that Spook Country was good and worth reading, I might give it a shot.

Oh, well. I mostly liked Idoru because it had certain characters that were awesome. The Etruscan, Chia Pet McKenzie, and Gomi Boy were good. The plot was secondary to my interest.

And honestly, I don't recommend Gibson to anyone. I figure others will do it for me, and his style DEFINITELY isn't everyone's cup of tea. I reserve my "WTFOMGBBQ" for when people say they didn't like Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion.

What are Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion?

*holds out plate of ribs*

A pair of books by Dan Simmons. The short-short of it is that Simmons took the Canterbury Tales and he set them in a science fiction setting. A bunch of pilgrims are making a journey on the eve of galactic civilization's collapse, and each one tells their story of why they're going. There's a noir story, a religious story, a war story... It's phenomenal.

Fall of Hyperion is the book about civilization collapsing.

It abounds with hypertech, scheming AIs, clones, all that good stuff. And the Megasphere - Hyperion's equivalent of the matrix - is everpresent, to the point where people won't even ask each other questions sometimes. They'll just point their cranial decks and agents at the info and have it faster than they could speak. And when the megasphere crashes, many go crazy due to percieved sensory loss.

^Oh, those sound nice. Thanks for the info, I'm gonna check them out. Just hope that they're translated in finnish.

Yes Pattern Recognition is lame but it was well written. I may dislike the content of Gibson's last book but his style is captivating.
I'll have to pick up the new book. He seems to be heading towards a Tom Clancy sort of direction, high tech in a modern setting. But we shall see.