Paranoia in spook country: William Gibson and the technological sublime of the war on terror

Abstract

After September 11, American writer William Gibson turned from the science fiction with which he had made his name to the realistic. Gibson's recent novel Spook Country turns towards GPS technology and its potential to track terrorists and containers to any point of the globe, using it as an entry into a post-9/11 milieu in which private companies are not so easily distinguished from the government. Spook Country presents a version of what Fredric Jameson has called a technological sublime, in which the ungraspable nature of electronic communications in global late capitalism produces an awe akin to earlier romantic notions of the sublime. Spook Country traces the paranoia of the war on terror across the world, in which the virtual and real have merged in the form of ever-present technologies of surveillance. The terror in the war on terror, I argue, has become technology itself. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.