always perceived him as someone who
takes everything in before making a de-
cision,” Womack continued. “Not par-
anoid, not suspicious. Just a good poker
player.” Writing near-future science fic-
tion, Womack said, requires “detach-
ment.” It’s like living during the Cold
War with knowledge of the bomb.
And yet Gibson seemed, at the turn
of the century, to be growing dissatisfied
with being detached. When “All To-
morrow’s Parties” was finished, “I felt a
little let down,” he said. “Not with how
the book had turned out, but there was
something about the experience.... It
was beginning to seem as though I was
doing something that belonged to a pre-
vious era.” He wondered if science fic-
tion, as a genre, might be yellowing with
age. He was certainly aging: at fifty, he’d
begun cognitive-behavioral therapy, hop-
ing to process the unconfronted expe-
riences of his childhood. Meanwhile, he
said, “things were different. The world
outside the window was beginning to
look considerably stranger to me than
the ones I was imagining for my fic-
tional futures.”
Unsure how to proceed, Gibson bided
his time. He flew back and forth to Lon-
don, working on a screenplay for “Neu-
romancer,” which had been optioned for
a film. He spent time on eBay—the first
Web site that felt to him like a real place,
perhaps because it was full of other peo-
ple and their junk. Through eBay, he dis-
covered an online watch forum, and,
through the forum, he developed some
expertise in military watches. He learned
of a warehouse in Egypt from which it
was possible to procure extinct Omega
components; he sourced, for the forum
membership, a particular kind of watch
strap, the G10, which had originally been
manufactured in the nineteen-seventies
and had since become obscure. (A ver-
sion of it, known as the NATO strap, is
now wildly popular in menswear circles.)
Gibson noticed that people with access
to unlimited information could develop
illusions of omniscience. He got into a
few political debates on the forum. He
felt the F.Q. creeping upward.
The advent of the online world, he
thought, was changing the physical one.
In the past, going online had felt like
visiting somewhere else. Now being on-
line was the default: it was our Here,
while those awkward “no service” zones
of disconnectivity had become our There.
Checking his Vancouver bank balance
from an A.T.M. in Los Angeles struck
him suddenly as spooky. It didn’t mat-
ter where you were in the landscape;
you were in the same place in the
datascape. It was as though cyberspace
were turning inside out, or “everting”—
consuming the world that had once sur-
rounded it.
In Japan, he had learned the word
otaku, used to describe people with ob-
sessive, laserlike interests. The Web, he
saw, allowed everyone everywhere to
develop the same otaku obsessions—
with television, coffee, sneakers, guns.
The mere possibility of such knowledge
lay like a scrim over the world. A phys-
ical object was also a search term: an
espresso wasn’t just an espresso; it was
also Web pages about crema, fair trade,
roasting techniques, varieties of beans.Things were texts; reality had been aug-
mented. Brand strategists revised the
knowledge around objects to make them
more desirable, and companies, places,
Presidents, wars, and people could be
advantageously rebranded, as though
the world itself could be reprogrammed.
It seemed to Gibson that this constant
reprogramming, which had become a
major driver of economic life, was im-
buing the present with a feeling—some-
thing like fatigue, or jet lag, or loss.
The suddenness with which the
world’s code could be rewritten aston-
ished him. “I was down in my basement
office, on a watch site that I spent a lot
of time on,” Gibson recalled. “Someone
on the East Coast posted, ‘Plane hit
World Trade Center.’ I Googled it—
there was nothing. I went to get some
coffee. And when I came back there was
a second post under the first: ‘Second“It’s that time of year again, when the air smells of relatives.”