 Sociocultural changes in post-September 11 America, including a resurgent tribalism and the "infantilization of society", first appeared as a prominent motif in Gibson's thought with Pattern Recognition. Gibson interpreted the attacks as a nodal point, "an experience out of culture" which irrevocably changed the course of history and marked "the true beginning of the 21st century." After crafting 100 pages of that novel, he was compelled to re-write the main character's backstory, which the attacks had suddenly rendered implausible; this he called "the strangest experience I 've ever had with a piece of fiction." The result saw Gibson noted as one of the first novelists to use the attacks to inform their writing. Nathan Lee in The Village Voice advanced the notion that while Pattern Recognition focused to an extent on "specifying the ambient sense of invasiveness in all aspects of life after the collapse of the towers", Spook Country accepted that anxiety as a premise, and was thus "the more reflective, less unnerving of the two novels".
