Mon. Aug. 20

 Does William Gibson want credit for spawning the term and genre "cyberpunk" which eventually swept up semi-bogus punk rocker Billy Idol in one of his desperate transformation moves? We don't know. But Gibson does create some masterful prose, blurring the lines between past, present and future and creating cynical scenarios that that tap into our secret - or not so secret fears. Orwell did that with "1984." remember? What's Gibson's new book, "Spook Country," all about? We confess, we haven't gotten there yet. But we will give space to Matthew Bey who reviewed the book for the Austin American-Statesman. Writes Bey:

"Spook Country" is Gibson's follow-up to 2003's "Pattern Recognition." Like that book, it takes place a year before its own publication date, presumably at the very moment Gibson was writing the book. In case we had any doubt about the exact timeframe, a character notices a magazine cover with the infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech and mentally calculates how long it's been since that particular moment of audacity.

The central character of "Spook Country" is Hollis Henry, a freelance writer who once fronted a goth rock band. Ostensibly, she has been hired by a European clone of Wired magazine to write an article about artists who use virtual reality hardware and GPS to create location-specific art. She comments on how passé the term "virtual reality" sounds — a bit of coy self-deprecation on Gibson's part, given how he pioneered the concept as we know it.

Henry's article, for all that it's hyped on the book's dust jacket, pans out as a big, fat, disappointing red herring. The magazine is in reality a front for the morally ambiguous Blue Ant advertising firm, the only crossover from "Pattern Recognition." The ad agency's founder, a Belgian with the improbable name "Bigend," is prone to crypto-cultural ramblings about how mass media comprises the world. He intended all along to exploit Henry's cult celebrity status to glean information from a paranoid GPS hacker. After all, how better to get a computer geek to drop his guard than with a mass-media icon?

How indeed, we at JSInk, wonder? We have to admit we're both intrigued and confused by Bey's summation, and that's struck us about what we've read of Gibson in the past (we think it was the past) too. The plotting is often dark and dense. But you can hear Gibson explain it - maybe - at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Monday Aug. 20 at 6 p.m. Tickets for $5 available across the street at the Brookline Booksmith.

290 Harvard St., Brookline, 617-734-2500 www.coolidge.org