What's William Gibson Up To?

All of his recent blog posts indicate he is writing a direct sequel to Spook Country; positively a first for his ouvre. He is characteristically mute on the subject; you'll notice he doesn't provide any commentary on the fragments, nor does he indicate if he is intending to publish them together as a new novel. However, four of the characters from Spook are explicitly mentioned: Hubertus Bigend, Inchmale, Milgrim, and Hollis Henry.

For those of you on my shared list who don't follow his work, allow me to explain why this intrigues me. Gibson is, facetiously, recreating a version of a fictional phenomena in his 2003 work Pattern Recognition where an anonymous artist posts scenes from an unnamed movie at random on various message boards. In a way he visualized Youtube's success about a year before it was a thing of any consequence. But that's not the first time the author has been imbued with a seer-like vision of the future. The military started using these in earnest about a decade after Gibson dreamed it up in his 1981 breakthrough Johnny Mnemonic.

This arbitrary posting of snippets from his latest work is identical to the type of promotion he used for Spook Country in 2006; an experiment which yielded something he refers to as the first hyper-annotated novel (see this wiki for a better explanation than I can provide). More to the point, Gibson's probably going to publish a book sooner rather than later. And that is always cause for excitement.

Gibson's Blog