None of this arbitration is directly visible in The Peripheral, of course. Taken together, all of this makes his latest novel, The Peripheral, appear as much the expression of an entire culture as a book written by a single person, a vision of the future that comes to us with the stamp of approval of the West’s most powerful cultural arbiters. An American who has lived in Vancouver, Canada since the 1960s, Gibson is a one-man brand for speculative fiction, a sort of Steve Jobs of prose narrative, the man who-as a note in a recent MoMA exhibition put it-is “credited with having coined the term ‘cyberspace,’ and having envisioned both the Internet and virtual reality before either existed.” Gibson’s recent collection of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor, shows him writing on the future for Wired, Time, Rolling Stone, Forbes, and the Whole Earth Catalog, and addressing audiences at the annual BookExpo America in New York and the Director’s Guild in Los Angeles. William Gibson is the writer we’re often told has the answer to these questions about fictional foresight. How far into the future can futuristic fiction see? What does it sense in the present that can then be projected into its vision of the world to come? What happens to climate change, stock market shudders, global inequality, and undocumented labor when you fast forward in time? Who does Donald Trump become when you give him half a century more? William Gibson, 2008 (Gonzo Bonzo / Flickr) Pulsating with racial and national anxieties, cyberpunk icon William Gibson’s future America is not so different from the one we know.

The jackpot trilogy