"One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition [Gibson's previous novel] is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text ... there's this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now."
Gibson
What the author is outlining here is the theory of a new and innovatively creative reading practice. The first line in Spook Country is:
"'Rausch,' said the voice in Hollis Henry's cell. 'Node', it said."
Node is a Wired-like magazine that doesn't and probably never will exist. Rausch is the (non-) editor. Hollis is in Los Angeles, doing a feature on locative art - holograms of the famous dead, which can be attached, like ectoplasm, to places (eg River Phoenix outside the Viper Room).
Hollis is sleeping (as the next sentence informs us) in the Mondrian. It's a hotel on Sunset Boulevard - along from the Standard and the Chateau Marmont: five-star joints which feature centrally in the first chapters. Gibson's current fiction is product- and allusion-heavy. And the plot of Spook Country (which revolves around the concept of GPS triangulation) is fiendishly indirect. Help is appreciated.
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