Reporting the Future

William Gibson—the ectomorph cage rattler out of Vancouver (via Toronto, via Wytheville, Virginia)—became, with his first novel, science fiction’s reigning monarch. Right out of the box, a category killer, baby Oedipus laying low his fathers. Gibson’s Neuromancer, famously the winner of the SF trifecta (the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards), was so good, so unexpectedly sui generis, he had to break the mould just to keep moving. So after two more linked novels, Gibson wrote a second trilogy set merely in the near future, then a third, this time in the near past. That work done, the very title “science fiction” outgrown, what is next? His tweets suggest he is not through with that last trilogy, not by a long shot, but whatever form the new work takes, certain tropes and passions will recur, as they have always recurred in his stories: the entropic decay of physical objects, the digestion of old tech into new uses, cryptic pieces...