Spook Country

Spook Country is William Gibson’s newest novel. According to amazon.com it will be released on August 7, 2007. Fragments of the novel have been posted non-sequentially on Gibson’s blog for some time now, and have led to much speculation on the content and plot of the novel. From the US publisher Putnam’s catalog:

“Tito is in his early 20s. Cuban by ancestry, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a Nolita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer.

Hollis Henry is a journalist, on investigative assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn’t exist yet, which is fine, she’s used to that, but it seems to be actively preventing the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they begin to exist. That would be odd, and even a little scary, if Hollis allowed herself to think about it much, which she can’t afford to do.

Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription anti-anxiety drugs, but he figures he wouldn’t survive 24 hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying the little bubble-packs. What Brown is up to Milgrim can’t say, but it seems to be military – at least, Milgrim’s very nuanced Russian is a big part of it, as is breaking into locked rooms.

Bobby Chombo is a ‘producer’, and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a trouble-shooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.”

Gibson is far and away my favorite author. Yet another reason to go on.