Spook Country (Blue Ant)

It was a bit weird for me to read Gibson outside of Sci-Fi genre. For example, while his brand heavy descriptions give credence & lived-in texture to a more fantastical cyberpunk setting, here they can be a bit cumbersome. Even in Pattern Recognition they were thematically appropriate, but here they felt kinda out of place.

In light of recent 2020s tech trends It was also funny to see a purportedly "non-fictional" 2000s world in which high fidelity AR goggles are commonplace, but everyone looses their minds about GPS.

Otherwise, the novel is perfectly serviceable. Pace is good, character motivations mostly check out. There's some "eccentric billionaire with goldfish-like attention span" reasoning, but that too seems plausible. In the end mystery is revealed, plot points solved, good guys win & bad guys lose.

In the end it left me craving for a more traditional Sci-Fi read.

Loved the characters. Would like to see more of them. I'm am sure I can't write a review to do it justice, but it was fascinating to me. The juxtaposition of old mainstream tech from 2006-7 with more futuristic devices, the then-time American political situation compared to today's current flavor of madness, and my own memories of playing the augmented reality real-world location-based game Ingress compared to the book's interesting locative art. I enjoyed the dry sense of humor. There was no "Womp womp" trumpet accompanying the carefully placed sentences. I look forward to diving into the third book in the series.