next*

According to a recent issue of The Economist, the next new web is the geoweb – a web of coordinates and connections between the network cloud above and the earth below. William Gibson, a science fiction writer who's been covering the future for so long that he actually coined the term cyberspace (Neuromancer, 1984) to describe and imagine the emerging Internet, seems to think so too.

Gibson is damned good at trend-spotting – a generation after Neuromancer, he's still got one of the keenest eyes for the zeitgeist -- capturing and recombining extreme sport practices, tech and media trends, immersive gaming, the memes of convergence culture, and the absurd excesses of the global advertising and entertainment industry -- in a fabulous drift-net of words.

Gibson's latest fiction, Spook Country, focuses on locative media – digital phantasms and 3D installations that exist in a virtual medium tied to place. He weaves a nuanced, thoughtfully textured look at the grid-like realm defined by GPS – and the places where it intersects with culture, commerce, and the global economy, legit and illicit.

In Spook Country, Gibson's science fiction is carefully situated in the present --- a present in which "intelligence... is advertising turned inside out;" in which skilled geowankers are in demand by virtual reality artists, nameless governmental security agencies, international brand magnates, fictitious magazine publishers, well-heeled digital art curators, rogue soldiers of fortune, and shadowy agents of undisclosed identity and citizenship, who don't always know their own employers.

In the opening chapter, Hollis Henry, former lead singer of nineties band the Curfew, has taken a writing assignment for a mysterious European magazine called node. node hasn't launched yet, but Hollis is in LA to learn about location-based art, including a vivid, virtual memorial of the death of River Phoenix, experienced through a special VR helmet, and geolocated to the precise spot on the sidewalk where he collapsed outside the Viper Room.

Gibson's characters have some of the elusive iconic quality of Second Life avatars. They have just enough depth to be engaging, enough authenticity to be utterly believable and unattainably cool. They inhabit a jumpy, fashion-conscious, highly designed plot that might not stand up to really close scrutiny.

Spook Country was on the mind of many attendees at the Wired NextFest earlier this fall, where the future was on display at the Los Angeles Convention Center in a collection of luminous pod-like pavilions, focused on future trends in exploration, transportation, communications. The digitization of the geospatial realm and the visual mapping of our life and times seems to be everywhere this season -- like Dilbert discovering ZoneTag and defining the next wave of online world-building.

What does it mean when our wild blue planet becomes a grid where everyone's coordinates can be known and instantly shared? What happens when you can superimpose and geolocate the past? What does it mean when every shipping container has a story to tell? And why would a magazine publisher decide to use a cloak of invisibility for his launch strategy?

Gibson's storytelling weaves a spell of intrigue that transcends geography and its past limitations and leads us gently into a spooky future with a upbeat ending.

Popularity: 6% [?]