Genre with the wind

Photo: Michael O’Shea

William Gibson knows what it’s like to be pigeonholed as a genre writer. His 1984 debut, Neuromancer, won him commercial success and got him pegged as “the father of cyberpunk,” the genre that mixes gritty, erotic narratives with dystopic visions of high-tech times. It’s been a hard label to shirk. “One of the things that happens if you have success with your first novel is that publishers want you to just keep doing that,” the author, 59, says from his home in Vancouver. “There’s always a certain part of the audience that wants exactly the same experience again, but with a different title.”

Gibson, who thinks that a lot of writing about the future is “goofy,” has long resisted this pressure to regurgitate his early work. “I’ve kept working with the toolkit I got from science fiction,” the author says. But instead of looking to the future, he’s chosen to set novels such as 2003’s Pattern Recognition in what he refers to as the “speculative present.” His latest, Spook Country, is his least forward-gazing effort yet: It’s a spy thriller set firmly in the very recent past. Still, even as the book touches on actual current events, it’s fantastical enough to make a lot of sci-fi novels seem downright quaint.

Spook Country focuses on three characters whose lives overlap in unexpected ways: Hollis Henry, a retired rock musician who is now doing freelance journalism; Tito, a young, iPod-toting Cuban-Chinese master of urban acrobatic evasion; and Milgrim, an Ativan junkie with a gift for semiotics who is being used by a government thug to track Tito and his ilk. All are pursuing a container holding a large amount of money that the U.S. Air Force “mislaid” in Baghdad. The cache’s constantly changing location is known only by a paranoiac GPS savant named Bobby Chombo.

Working in the present doesn’t always allow the same narrative flexibility as the more anything-goes world of sci-fi does. An early critic of Neuromancer called Gibson out because there wasn’t enough bandwidth in the entire world for the events portrayed in the book to work. “I didn’t even know what bandwidth was,” Gibson recalls. “I took solace in thinking, Well, whatever it is, there is going to be shitloads of it in the future, buddy.”

Spook Country, however, has far more respect for factual boundaries. “At a very late stage of the book, I had to put in some fixes because somebody pointed out to me that GPS doesn’t actually work indoors,” Gibson says. “I’m really glad somebody caught that for me.”

One of the most stunning things about Gibson’s new novel is that even its most outlandish aspects—the GPS wizardry, the gravity-defying parkour, the text-code languages—are verifiably authentic. Even the heist has a real-world counterpart: In early July, a private bank in Baghdad was robbed of $282 million in U.S. currency. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that money wasn’t part of the same pile I’m talking about in Spook Country,” Gibson says. “All of that stuff about how much money the Air Force shipped into Baghdad—that’s real, I didn’t make that up. That was the largest amount of money ever shipped out of the United States, and no one can account for it.”

Spook Country’s gritty wartime cynicism may leave fans from the Neuromancer days jonesing for a less-recognizable world, but Gibson’s latest novel reveals that he’s still growing as a writer. Sure, he’ll always get props for coining the word cyberspace, but he’s interested in something more tangible than paranoid speculations about technological progress. In Spook Country, he finds plenty to write about in the world as we know it, reminding us that these times are weirder than any future we could imagine.

Spook Country (Putnam, $25.95) comes out Tue 7. Gibson reads at Barnes & Noble Union Square on Aug 14.