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Rather more than twenty years ago, William Gibson exploded on to the science fiction scene with his novel Neuromancer, probably the most successful first novel ever in the history of that genre. It won virtually all the prizes and awards for 1984, and launched and defined the new mode of "cyberpunk" which has dominated SF ever since. It seemed to be the perfect script for the computer revolution which was at that time just about to take off. The new hero of the day was the hacker—invariably young, operating outside and indeed against the massed forces of orthodox business and government, owing his and sometimes her success to mastery of forces and techniques which everyone used but few really understood. A key idea was "cyberspace," the "virtual reality" in which the hackers roamed freely, jacked into their computers, trying to beat the "ice," the Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics with which the banks and the authorities guarded their wealth and their secrets. But the secret of Gibson's success was style: he evolved a way of writing which linked the "cyber" and the "punk," on the one hand the aggressive, allusive, street-smart slang of the young and knowing; on the other, the compressed, high-tech, instruction-manual gibberish which almost all of us have failed at one time or another to cope with. No one ever finished Neuromancer without thinking there was something he hadn't understood. Gibson's book made you fear that you were in reality living within a net of unseen and impalpable forces—as indeed, if you consider electronic environments, we are.

Spook Country William Gibson Putnam, 2007 371 pp., $25.95

Most of the predictions implied in Gibson's early novels turned out to be wrong. Twenty years later, the world is not dominated by Japanese zaibatsus, and the Asian business model, once viewed with awed respect as representing the wave of the future, has repeatedly turned out to have large financial holes in it. Hackers have had their successes, but they rarely amounted to much, and the real dangers of the computer world turned out to be pettier if more annoying: "spam," "phishing," and "identity theft," none of them significant in the Gibson universe. In fact the world seems to have returned to the grip of the "suits," the boring middle-aged professionals who, it turns out, make money out of smart young things rather than the other way round. The question is, has Gibson got a second shot in his chamber? That is what one wonders as one reads Spook Country.

His new book is arguably not science fiction at all, belonging rather to the mode of techno-thriller, as defined above all by Tom Clancy. Loosely picking up some threads from Gibson's previous novel, Pattern Recognition, it's set very much in the present. It's written in short bursts, no less than 84 chapters averaging fewer than five pages a time, and much of the novel darts without apparent connection between several plot-lines and groups of characters. There's an ex-rock singer, Hollis, who lost her money in dotcoms (Gibson didn't predict that either) and is now a journalist trying to do a feature on Bobby Chombo, who seems to have invented a new form of computer art. There's a kind of ex-Cuban ninja called Tito, whose extended family has connections with both the KGB and CIA. He is being spied on by a grim organization-man called Brown (certainly a code-name), who much to his disgust has to employ a homeless street-kid called Milgrim, because of the latter's ability to read the code the Tito family uses. And there is the vague and ominous presence of Bigend, whose name has to be pronounced Belgian-style (Bijean), whose interests and intentions are obscure, but who keeps reminding the reader that the serious money is now often in Europe, in Switzerland or Luxemburg or maybe Lichtenstein. As in Gibson's previous books, there seems to be no middle class. Characters are either dirt-poor or fantastically rich. Milgrim owns nothing other than the clothes he stands up in—which his keeper proceeds to take away from him, replacing them with cheap mass-produced things known to be bug-free. The only objects he actually values are the overcoat he stole from a deli and the book he found in the pocket of it, a history of medieval messianism. Bigend by contrast has gone through normal luxury and out the other side; his apartment features a bed which floats on air, supported only by magnets (note: do not crawl under it while wearing anything metallic).

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