William Gibson seems to like working in trilogies. There was the Sprawl trilogy (cyberspace, mirror-shaded assassins, AIs gone amok) and the Bridge trilogy (large-scale nanotech engineering, indigents-turned-social revolutionaries, VR). With Spook Country, which continues the same story universe as his earlier Pattern Recognition, Gibson seems to be working towards another. The difference, though, is that where the Sprawl and Bridge novels dealt with near-future dystopias, Spook Country (and its predecessor) explores a world that is decidedly now, its dystopia the one we inhabit everyday.

The novels centres around a set of three vastly different characters who all get caught up in a situation which none of them control, but to which each one is essential. There’s Hollis Henry, an ex-musician on a freelance writing assignment for Node, a magazine which doesn’t, as she can figure, actually exist. There’s Milgrim, a prescription junky who gets accosted by a mysterious G-Man and used for his knack for deciphering obscure Russian SMS encryption techniques. And there’s Tito, member of a quasi-criminal “family” so organized as to be invisible, whose roots stretch back to Castro and the Soviets.

Throughout the intricate and sometimes confusing plot, each one of them illuminates a different perspective on the shared story, so that we, the readers, get a top-down view of a world curiously like our own; one in which the big players, the really big movers and shakers of global power, don’t ever make themselves explicitly known. Instead they work through go-betweens and contract corporate mercenaries, wielding unlimited wealth and state of the art technology in the process. It is into this unseen world that the main characters (who don’t normally inhabit it) are deftly triangulated, each uncovering a different angle, a different motive, a different part of the secret that drives the story.

Of course, befitting Gibson, technology plays a huge part in the narrative, but in Spook Country the crazy-futuristic advanced mind-blowing gear is all stuff we actually have. Like, in real life. Even the delightfully-named (and possibly psychotic) gazillionaire Hubertus Bigend’s mag-lev bed exists somewhere, right now. Yes, there’s cell phones and iPods and wardriving in search of unsecured wifi, but Gibson uses the tech in the story, on the one hand, to reflect our own quotidian use of these gizmos to a degree which many authors neglect and, on the other, to help us realize – in some small way – the fantastic potential of these technologies in contemporary culture.

While it doesn’t have the same sense of futuristic novelty as Gibson’s earlier work, Spook Country is certainly in the same stylistic vein as, say, All Tomorrow’s Parties, but, well, just muted a bit. More realistic. As with Pattern Recognition, this novel doesn’t predict a possible future, it presumes a certain kind of saturated present, where the lines between media and art and politics and business all blur and intermingle. In a certain and highly entertaining respect, this novel speaks to what it means to live in the world we do, where technology plays, perhaps, a bigger part than we want to admit.