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.

Let’s presuppose two things. First, that life forms other than our own exist in this universe. Second, that we’ve been receiving undecipherable radio messages from them for ten years.

Factoring Humanity is, essentially, the story of Kyle and Heather, both professors at the University of Toronto. Kyle is a computer scientist working on artificial intelligence and quantum computing and Heather is in the Psychology department and has devoted her career to analyzing the alien messages and trying to translate them into something we can understand. When their youngest (and sole remaining) daughter drops a bombshell accusation, this already fractured family threatens to break apart completely.

Until, that is, Heather successfully deciphers the messages into a blueprint for some Alpha Centauri contraption (whilst Kyle tries to defend himself against his daughter’s shattering allegations). This device has the power to transcend space and time, and can somehow teach humanity more about themselves than about any creatures from the stars.

Sawyer tackles some pretty interesting science in this novel, particularly Kyle’s AI research project/confidante/comedian, Cheetah, a strangely contemporary version of HAL 9000 that provides an unlooked-for (and somewhat cliché) source of empathetic human emotion. The author’s use of Jungian ideas of the collective unconscious, and their application, are also quite intriguing, and they play a central part in the story’s dénouement, when the hive mind awakens and everyone suddenly becomes very polite.

What I got from this novel, and from the majority of Sawyer’s work, is a sense of optimism about the future. Some science fiction uses a kind of forward-thinking existential dread to propel its narrative, but not Sawyer. He shows us the extent to which we dread the present, and how the classic elements of sci-fi (aliens, technology, etc.) can provide a utopian, tree-lined avenue towards whatever lies in store for us as a species and a planet.

Many of the ethical conflicts that arise in the novel echo Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter’s The Light of Other Days, whereby people can surveil each other constantly, anonymously, and surreptitiously through the use of wormhole viewers. The surveillance in Factoring Humanity, though, is of a more emotional bent, and leads to greater understanding rather than greater paranoia.

One of the other, reasons I like this book, albeit a minor, tangential one, is that it’s set (like most of Sawyer’s novels) in and around the city of Toronto, where I live. There’s something about seeing streets and bookstores and cafés you know and like being echoed back at you in print. But whether you live here or not, Factoring Humanity makes a point of stating that we’re all, in a very real sense, connected, and that the sooner we realize it, the sooner we can get on with becoming a better species.

It’s just kind of sad that it takes a piece of alien machinery to enforce the golden rule.

Chuck Palahniuk is the kind of author from whom you always expect something… else. His style beggars description; at times maddeningly existentialist, morose, ultra-violent, sincere – his work runs the gamut of the human condition. It isn’t afraid to peel back all the little lies we tell ourselves or polite enough to stop laughing at them when we ask nicely. His work kicks you in the shin and then hocks a loogie right in your face.

With Lullaby, Palahniuk continues to explore the alienation that comes part and parcel with living the modern life. Its protagonist, Mr. Streator, is a newspaper reporter whose dislike of what passes for mass media goes beyond annoyance. His wrath for the white noise soundtrack of everyday life comes to a head when, whilst working on a story about crib death, he discovers that each of the bereaved parents he interviews sang the same song from the same book before putting their babies to sleep. Permanently, it turns out.

Streator knows the culling song, as it’s called, and through trial and error finds out that its works on anyone, as fast as you can recite its lines. He begins silencing the world around him; dozens die from a song not even sung, just thought. Mr. Streator realizes just how terrible a power this is, and wants to seek out all copies of the song and destroy them. But there are others who know it, and they’re not so altruistic.

Having read Fight Club and Choke, I knew to expect morose, damaged characters, frustrated and angry. And while Lullaby delivers them, it also offers a classic tale of good versus evil, of redemption versus damnation, of resignation versus headlong determination. It’s the only Palahniuk novel I’ve read with magic in it, actual hocus-pocus abracadabra magic, and while at first I found it entertaining and different, it is after all just a gimmick, like multiple personalities or Jesus complexes.

The novel is, at times, endearing, in a neurotic sort of way, and you can’t help but put yourself in the characters’ shoes. Would you try to save the world from this soundwave plague that could liquidate entire populations just by broadcasting it on the radio? Or would you embrace the power and use it to cull from this world everything you hate?

I still haven’t figured that one out.

South of the Border, West of the Sun is a story of a man, Hajime, who runs a pair of successful jazz clubs in Tokyo. He lives what could be called an idyllic life – successful and married to a beautiful woman with two young daughters. But the thought haunts him that this isn’t really his life, that he’s somehow faking it.

Upon reaching middle age, Hajime finds himself with an unrequited desire for a girl he knew in his childhood and when she appears at his club one night, mysterious and gorgeous, she sets off within Hajime a self-destructive questioning, which leads him to rediscover loss, sorrow, and the entaglements of memory and love.

As with many of Murakami’s novels, South of the Border focuses on an ordinary man with an ordinary set of baggage he’s accumulated over the course of his life. But (and this is where Murakami shines as a storyteller of the fantastically quotidian) when that baggage comes back from where it lay to haunt once again, the protagonist is forced to abandon the everyday and step outside of the life he’s built, no matter how empty or precarious that step might be.

For some readers, like me, this novel will strike a chord with its haunting, evocative prose. Every one of us has someone who, if things had gone just a little bit differently, may still be in our lives today, instead of wandering the halls of our memories. With this novel, Murakami opens those long forgotten corridors and lets out the ghosts of the past, and it’s from that collision of past desire with present reality that he shows us, through his characters, how weak we really are in the face of our servitude to recollection.

Critics could argue that Murakami’s work is formulaic, based on a consistent pattern running through most of his fiction. I’ve made that same point myself, so I can’t disagree. But, to use South of the Border as an example, the overarching theme may be the same, but it’s through the specific details of the story, the little things, the habits, the quirks, the depth (or lack) of emotion, that Murakami reveals just how extraordinary an ordinary life can be.