The Peripheral is an emphatic return to the science fiction he ceased to write after the turn of this century, set in not one but two futures. 'But I could sort of curate what had already happened.' 'I was never able to predict,' Gibson says. His hard-boiled books-cool but not cold, deceptively well written-go by in tangles of sleek sentences. Since then, in books like Virtual Light (1993) and Idoru (1996), he’s imagined a pretty convincing facsimile of modern reality television, long before the advent of anything that actually resembled modern reality television a cure for AIDS that increasingly seems like a way we will in fact finally cure AIDS ( Virtual Light again) and a whole host of other now familiar ideas about nanotechnology and viral marketing and drones shaped like silvery penguins that swim through the air (2010’s Zero History yes, they do exist). We have Neuromancer to thank for making ubiquitous the word cyberspace, which Gibson described as 'a consensual hallucination'-still maybe the best description of whatever it is we now spend most of our days doing. In the thirty years since the publication of his first novel, Neuromancer, he’s gotten plenty wrong about the future but also an unsettling amount of it right. We all should probably hope William Gibson doesn’t think the world is fucked. 'In retrospect, I think I wrote the book to try to find out.' 'I don’t have an answer for that yet,' Gibson says, the light slanting through his windows.

Gibson spook country