Since Pattern Recognition (2003), his novels have dealt not with imagined futures, but with the structured flows of information through the international data economy of the present day. In Singapore, Gibson found, 'The physical past… has almost entirely vanished.'Īs the title of his latest novel suggests, Gibson is still interested in the ways that postmodernity flattens history into serviceable narratives, from records of financial data – a credit check database returns the information that a character has 'zero history' – to brand-formation and marketing strategy. There was, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, no there there. 'There was no dirt whatsoever,' he wrote, 'no muss, no furred fractal edge to things.' The city-state had all the depth of virtual reality. The result – 'Disneyland with the death penalty' – was a witty, perceptive piece of reportage, hinting at a non-fiction talent equal to the vision that had elevated Gibson to digital-age guru. Singapore, gearing up for its mid-90s boom, was a futuristic technopolis of networked transportation flows and identikit malls, with an authoritarian approach to public policing. A decade on from the cyberpunk ground zero of Neuromancer, Gibson had just published Virtual Light, the first novel of what would become his second science-fiction trilogy. I n 1993, Wired magazine sent William Gibson to Singapore.

Gibson spook country