Original proposal for William Gibson's Spook Country

By Cory Doctorow at 1:04 pm Wednesday, Aug 8

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