Original proposal for William Gibson's Spook Country

Amazon is hosting a copy of the original book-proposal for William Gibson's superb new political intrigue and art novel Spook Country. I've never read the proposal for a book after reading the book — it's nicely illuminating. It's also absolutely fascinating to see how the book morphed from idea to novel.

"Warchalker" is one of the more obscure and peculiar of the
many warblogs and news-filters that sprang up on the Web in
the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Obscure because it
generally offers little more than the apparent result of
some news-junkie sitting in a basement, endlessly splicing
in links to the latest-breaking from AP, Reuters or other
standard sources. Peculiar because the thread of routine
news is occasionally interrupted by some deeply strange
dispatch from Warchalker himself — as, for instance, his
first-person account of the looting of the Baghdad museum,
involving any number of international art-mercenaries and
at least two supposedly extraterrestrial artifacts. Or his
earlier report from a secret US facility in which a gifted
"remote viewer" is sometimes able to describe, in minute
quotidian detail but with a complete lack of imaginative
understanding, the doings of the fugitive Osama — though
without being able to hear what OBL might be saying, or
know where he is. "They're having that spicy lentil thing
again… Now he's flossing his teeth… It looks like a room in
a really bad motel in New Mexico, but there's no glass in
the window, no television, and he keeps peeing into this
hole in the floor…"

PDF Link

(Thanks, Scot!)

See also:
William Gibson's Spook Country
William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present
William Gibson on writing in the age of Google