The desert of the real.

Jacking in.

It has only been 8 years but the principal plot mechanism of The Matrix is already feeling dated. All of the worrying about finding landlines seems hopelessly antiquated and a little silly. Surely Morpheus has a few vintage Airports stacked somewhere in the Nebuchadnezzar.

The Matrix is, however, the final artifact of the cyberpunk movement and it is a bit unfair to criticize it for keeping with some of the trappings of the genre. [And the race to find ports made for some pretty spectacular action sequences.]

It is little surprise then that William Gibson in Spooky Country slyly takes a stab at the genre he helped create. “Virtual reality?” asks Hollis Henry, “she hadn’t heard the term spoken aloud in years, she thought, as she pronounced it.”

Spook Country, Gibson's second novel set in contemporary times, reveals an entirely different cyberspace then the one he first envisioned in his seminal work Necromancer. Hackers are no longer porting into a consensual hallucinatory matrix. The future turned out to be far stranger: cyberspace is virtually everywhere.

In a brilliant turn, Gibson takes the logic of Web 2.0 and applies it to everyday reality. The once bemoaned "desert of the real" comes alive with locative art installations and user created metatags.

Imagine donning a visor on a personal tour of Notre Dame. For a couple of euros you can download an official tour guide where little information bubbles populate your field of vision describing various stages in the cathedral's history. When you reach the belltower, a holographic overlay would recreate scenes from the 1939 movie adaptation of Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.

Since Web 2.0 is not about the dissemination of official histories, but the proliferation of multiplicities, you would, of course, also have downloaded alternative metatags -- perhaps a Medievalist's analysis of the breathtaking stain-glass windows and your friends' personal opinions of the architecture from their visit the year before.

Marginal glosses for the cyberage.

Gibson's idea of locative art is provocative, yet Spook Country never fully capitalizes on it. Instead, it is relegated to an abandoned subplot as Gibson explores the exploitation of Iraq War funds -- and the book suffers for it.

While Pattern Recognition, one of the great novels of the past decade, was overflowing with ideas and novel terminology, Spook Country feels oddly barren. It is telling that the reviews I have read of the work touch on the exact two moments that had my imagination spinning -- Gibson's literary development of locative art and his application of technological analysis on the seemingly incongruent field of Medieval History:

“Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been a purely signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.”