CONSIDER this frank greeting in William Gibson’s “Spook Country”: “I’ve just checked the number of your Google hits, and read your Wikipedia entry.” This is what translates as fame today: a foothold in the ether, an identity composed by a faceless committee of unknown size. Gibson famously coined the term “cyberspace” in his reality-crashing, paradigm-shifting 1984 debut, “Neuromancer,” and his conception of its “consensual hallucination” rings truer now, more than two decades later, as we pursue terminally framed existences teeming with hyperlinks and blogs, worlds of Warcraft and second lives.
The Googlee in question is Hollis Henry, singer in a defunct 1990s cult band, the Curfew. She’s now a journalist working on a story for a shadowy magazine, Node, that hasn’t published an issue yet. (It’s variously and hilariously described as a would-be Wired, generating sub-rosa buzz by its very anti-buzz.) Cults, shadows, secrets: in other words, Gibson country.
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