Spook Country

Gibson, William. Spook Country. New York and Other Cities: G. P. Putnam's Sons-Penguin Group, 2007.

In Samuel R. Delany's sense of the term, a mostly mundane thriller set in the North America of the early 21st century. Significant here as a work by William Gibson as the middle work in the series Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country, and Zero History, (2010),[1]with a minor theme of "locative art": artistic expression involving augmented reality (AR), apparently souped up with what seems like virtual reality, spurring the development of advanced VR helmets (p. 369).

In the formulation in the Wikipedia entry for the novel,

Through its treatment of locative technology, the novel revisits notions of virtual reality and cyberspace prominent in Gibson's early cyberpunk fiction. One character proposes that cyberspace is everting; becoming an integral and indistinguishable element of the physical world rather than a domain to be visited. During the book tour for the novel, Gibson elaborated on this theme, proposing that the ubiquity of connectivity meant that what had been called "cyberspace" is no longer a discrete sphere of activity separate from and secondary to normal human activity, but that those increasingly less common parts of normal life free from connectivity were the exception. "If the book has a point to make where we are now with cyberspace", he commented, it was that cyberspace "has colonized our everyday life and continues to colonize everyday life."[2]

— Allow for the possibility that Spook Country is a well-written, highly competent caper story without a strong point to make on cyberspace.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 28Ap20