 William Gibson, the 'Godfather of Cyberpunk', is midway through a gruelling, continent-hopping promotional tour and apologises for his exhaustion with an apt digital age metaphor: "The buffer's still loading extra memory," he quips.
His latest novel, however, the political thriller Spook Country, sees Gibson abandoning dystopian tomorrows for an all too recognisable here and now. And while some have registered surprise at Gibson's decision to forsake the future, he seems genuinely bemused by the fuss as he explains his stance matter of factly: "For at least a decade prior to writing Pattern Recognition, my previous novel, I think I've said at least once in every interview that I thought it would be possible to write a novel set in the present with relatively little imaginary technology, and have it feel very much like these 21st-century imaginary futures I'd created."
Meanwhile, the idea that human progress might be leading to a glorious technological apex futurists call 'The Singularity' is one he approaches with jocular suspicion. Likening that belief with the more outré ideas of Christian End Timers, he calls it "The Geek Rapture".
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