Spook Country

Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101147288
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
The “cool and scary”(San Francisco Chronicle) New York Times bestseller from the author of Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer. • spook (spo͞ok) n.: A specter; a ghost. Slang for “intelligence agent.” • country (ˈkən-trē) n.: In the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind. • spook country (spo͞ok ˈkən-trē) n.: The place where we all have landed, few by choice. The place we are learning to live. Hollis Henry is a journalist, on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn’t exist yet. Bobby Chombo apparently does exist, as a producer. But in his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. And Hollis Henry has been told to find him... “A devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist.”—The Washington Post Book World

Zero History

Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101443316
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Book Description
Hollis Henry never intended to work for global marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend again. But now she’s broke, and Bigend has just the thing to get her back in the game... Milgrim can disappear in almost any setting, and his Russian is perfectly idiomatic—so much so that he spoke it with his therapist in the secret Swiss clinic where Bigend paid for him to be cured of his addiction... Garreth doesn't owe Bigend a thing. But he does have friends from whom he can call in the kinds of favors powerful people need when things go sideways... They all have something Bigend wants as he finds himself outmaneuvered and adrift, after a Department of Defense contract for combat-wear turns out to be the gateway drug for arms dealers so shadowy they can out-Bigend Bigend himself. “Zero History is [Gibson’s] best yet, a triumph of science fiction as social criticism and adventure.”—BoingBoing.net

All Tomorrow's Parties

Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101146486
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
“The ferociously talented Gibson delivers his signature mélange of technopop splendor and post-industrial squalor” (Time) in this New York Times bestseller that features his hero from Idoru... Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Tokyo; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to happen in San Francisco. The mists make it easy to hide, if hiding is what you want, and even at the best of times reality there seems to shift. A gray man moves elegantly through the mists, leaving bodies in his wake, so that a tide of absences alerts Laney to his presence. A boy named Silencio does not speak, but flies through webs of cyber-information in search of the one object that has seized his imagination. And Rei Toi, the Japanese Idoru, continues her study of all things human. She herself is not human, not quite, but she’s working on it. And in the mists of San Francisco, at this rare moment in history, who is to say what is or is not impossible...

Pattern Recognition

Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141904461
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Book Description
'Part-detective story, part-cultural snapshot . . . all bound by Gibson's pin-sharp prose' Arena -------------- THE FIRST NOVEL IN THE BLUE ANT TRILIOGY - READ ZERO HISTORY AND SPOOK COUNTRY FOR MORE Cayce Pollard has a new job. She's been offered a special project: track down the makers of an addictive online film that's lighting up the internet. Hunting the source will take her to Tokyo and Moscow and put her in the sights of Japanese hackers and Russian Mafia. She's up against those who want to control the film, to own it - who figure breaking the law is just another business strategy. The kind of people who relish turning the hunter into the hunted . . . A gripping spy thriller by William Gibson, bestselling author of Neuromancer. Part prophesy, part satire, Pattern Recognition skewers the absurdity of modern life with the lightest and most engaging of touches. Readers of Neal Stephenson, Ray Bradbury and Iain M. Banks won't be able to put this book down. -------------- 'Fast, witty and cleverly politicized' Guardian 'A big novel, full of bold ideas . . . races along like an expert thriller' GQ 'Dangerously hip. Its dialogue and characterization will amaze you. A wonderfully detailed, reckless journey of espionage and lies' USA Today 'A compelling, humane story with a sympathetic heroine searching for meaning and consolation in a post-everything world' Daily Telegraph 'Electric, profound. Gibson's descriptions of Tokyo, Russia and London are surreally spot-on' Financial Times

Distrust That Particular Flavor

Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 042525299X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
A collection of New York Times bestselling author William Gibson’s articles and essays about contemporary culture—a privileged view into the mind of a writer whose thinking has shaped not only a generation of writers but our entire culture... Though best known for his fiction, William Gibson is as much in demand for his cutting-edge observations on the world we live in now. Originally printed in publications as varied as Wired, the New York Times, and the Observer, these articles and essays cover thirty years of thoughtful, observant life, and are reported in the wry, humane voice that lovers of Gibson have come to crave. “Gibson pulls off a dazzling trick. Instead of predicting the future, he finds the future all around him, mashed up with the past, and reveals our own domain to us.”—The New York Times Book Review

Joe Country

Author: Mick Herron
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1641290560
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
If Spook Street is where spies live, Joe Country is where they go to die. In Slough House, the London outpost for disgraced MI5 spies, memories are stirring, all of them bad. Catherine Standish is buying booze again, Louisa Guy is raking over the ashes of lost love, and new recruit Lech Wicinski, whose sins make him an outcast even among the slow horses, is determined to discover who destroyed his career, even if he tears his life apart in the process. Meanwhile, in Regent’s Park, Diana Taverner’s tenure as First Desk is running into difficulties. If she’s going to make the Service fit for purpose, she might have to make deals with a familiar old devil . . . And with winter taking its grip, Jackson Lamb would sooner be left brooding in peace, but even he can’t ignore the dried blood on his carpets. So when the man responsible for killing a slow horse breaks cover at last, Lamb sends the slow horses out to even the score.

Agency

Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101986956
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “ONE OF THE MOST VISIONARY, ORIGINAL, AND QUIETLY INFLUENTIAL WRITERS CURRENTLY WORKING”* returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times bestselling The Peripheral. William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term “cyberspace” and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is “spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer.” Now Gibson is back with Agency—a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most current events. Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her cryptic new employers don’t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it’s best they don’t. Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, in a different time line entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can’t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it. *The Boston Globe

Spook Street

Author: Mick Herron
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 161695647X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
"What happens when an old spook starts to lose his mind? Do the Services have a retirement home for people who know too many secrets but don't remember their secrets? Or does someone come to take care of the senile spy for good? These are the questions River Cartwright must ask himself as his grandfather--David Cartwright, a Cold War-era operative--starts to forget to wear pants, and starts believing everyone in his life is someone sent by Services to watch him. However, River has other things to worry about. A bomb goes off in the middle of a flash mob performance in a busy shopping center and kills forty innocent civilians. The agents of Slough House have to figure out who is behind this act of terror before the situation escalates"--

Idoru

Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101158050
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
“The best novel William Gibson has ever written about the world we’re entering daily. Neuromancer made Gibson famous; Idoru cements that fame.”—The Washington Post Book World 21st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain. Light everywhere blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea-creature... Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the “signature” an individual creates simply by going about the business of living. But Laney knows how to sift for the dangerous bits. Which makes him useful—to certain people. Chia McKenzie is here on a rescue mission. She’s fourteen. Her idol is the singer Rez, of the band Lo/Rez. When the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club decided that he might be in trouble in Tokyo, they sent Chia to check it out. Rei Toei is the idoru—the beautiful, entirely virtual media star adored by all Japan. Rez has declared that he will marry her. This is the rumor that has brought Chia to Tokyo. True or not, the idoru and the powerful interests surrounding her are enough to put all their lives in danger...

William Gibson

Author: Gary Westfahl
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095081
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
The leading figure in the development of cyberpunk, William Gibson (born in 1948) crafted works in which isolated humans explored near-future worlds of ubiquitous and intrusive computer technology and cybernetics. This volume is the first comprehensive examination of the award-winning author of the seminal novel Neuromancer (and the other books in the Sprawl trilogy, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive), as well as other acclaimed novels including recent bestsellers Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. Renowned scholar Gary Westfahl draws upon extensive research to provide a compelling account of Gibson's writing career and his lasting influence in the science fiction world. Delving into numerous science fiction fanzines that the young Gibson contributed to and edited, Westfahl delivers new information about his childhood and adolescence. He describes for the first time more than eighty virtually unknown Gibson publications from his early years, including articles, reviews, poems, cartoons, letters, and a collaborative story. The book also documents the poems, articles, and introductions that Gibson has written for various books, and its discussions are enriched by illuminating comments from various print and online interviews. The works that made Gibson famous are also featured, as Westfahl performs extended analyses of Gibson's ten novels and nineteen short stories. Lastly, the book presents a new interview with Gibson in which the author discusses his correspondence with author Fritz Leiber, his relationship with the late scholar Susan Wood, his attitudes toward critics, his overall impact on the field of science fiction, and his recently completed screenplay and forthcoming novel.