the background noise

Some thoughts about William Gibson's Spook Country. Minor spoilers ahead. Now it's probably fair to say I had some misgivings about Pattern Recognition, the first book in what is referred to as the Blue Ant trilogy. Indeed upon finishing this follow up I pondered if I could get away with just copying and pasting the same thoughts into this review as much of it still applied. One bout of careful consideration later I was just about to CTRL+V that content over when I paused for thought and realised that it wouldn't be entirely fair or accurate.

You know those cinematic universes you hear so much about? Of course you do, you know them, you love them, you can't walk into a cinema without running face first into them. Brilliant aren't they? Brilliant that is, when they work. But do you remember the time before them? Back to the age where your humble blockbuster, if it did well, could be part of a veritable cinematic franchise? You know it, the half-way house between one shot film entries and rolling cinematic odysseys. You get a film and if it did well you get a sequel, repeat and re-roll until the goodwill and the money stops pouring in. They're still around of course, you might even say it's the bedrock for what we have now in the MCU, the DCEU and all the other U's launched and in some cases, abandoned over the last decade. Once upon a time though, film series with entries numbering in the dozens was a relatively unheard of thing. Sequel entries were counted in single digits. Usually covering m