How Soon Is Now?

William Gibson, the godfather of cyberpunk, knows virtual reality. His books have influenced writers and technologists alike in the age of the Internet. But his novel Spook Country (new in paperback) turns the idea of how people create their own worlds on its head, as science creates its own ghostly world of digital phantoms superimposed on our own. Making personal and new communal realities is not just about technology, he argues. "I knew a man who was a global financier of some note, and his strategy was to make everyone operate on his time," said Gibson. "He'd go to various cities on Larry Time, and all these bankers had to stay on his day. He became his own time zone."

Set in the same continuity as his last novel, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country is the history of a near-past that never quite happened. In his version of 2006, artists are meta-tagging the world, spies transport information on iPod Nanos, and secrets, as one character tells another, are the very root of cool. Fairly mundane technology for the man who, in his seminal 1982 novella, Burning Chrome, coined the term "Cyberspace" and predicted (or dictated, depending on your viewpoint) the shape of the Internet. His influence on scientists sometimes disheartens Gibson: "They tend to focus on the gizmos and the imaginary technology, which is the easy part: It seems to grow out of me like fingernails."

Gibson sees his books as contemporary sociological commentary: His breakthrough near-future novel Neuromancer was really about its year of publication, 1984, filtering that year's concerns and obsessions through the lens of future tech. But last year is the new future as science-fiction authors struggle to keep up with even outmoded tech. So Gibson calls his more recent work speculative novels of the immediate past. "When I started to write science fiction in the 1960s," he said, "the present seemed to be a longer duration, five years or six months. It wasn't a blink."

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William Gibson will be signing copies of Spook Country at Barnes & Noble (10000 Research #158) on Wednesday, June 11, at 7:30pm.