Paranoia inSpook Country

William Gibson and the technological sublime of the war on terror

Bibliographic Data

ID2178513
AuthorsEm Mcavan (0009-0006-4524-3032)
Year2010
Volume46
Issue3-4
Pages405-413
Publication date2010-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17449855.2010.482431
OpenAlexW2027016022
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited12

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

Art · Art history · Capitalism · Globe · Government (linguistics · Literature · Paranoia · Political science · Politics · Romance · Sociology · Sublime · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Psychology · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction · History · Law · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub