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His first post-9/11 novel was Pattern Recognition, published in 2003, a spy thriller set principally in a contemporary London weighed down under a pall of fear about a terrorist attack.

Now comes its sequel, Spook Country, an edgy, geeky tale of spivs and innocents, local thugs and global entrepreneurs, spooks real and imagined and lots of gadgetry - the kind only Gibson could imagine but which soon, no doubt, we will all be using.

Again there is that Gibsonian mood beneath the novel's surface, with its hint of threat and menace and an all-pervading sense of disjunction. Where Thomas Pynchon, with whom Gibson's writing style has often been compared, might use paranoia as a structuring device, Gibson keeps it a silent partner lurking in the shadows behind the action, one that suggests there is every possibility things could develop into something lethal.

Yet while he admits he has switched genres, Gibson believes he has not switched timeframes. The way he sees it, he has always been writing about the present, no matter how fantastic the world of his novels.

"I just look at the culture around me and at the people and what they are doing non-rationally," he says. "That's what I put into my novels, that's what tells me what is going on in the culture. I just reflect reality back to my readers disguised as science fiction."

Gibson believes science fiction is a genre that is always about the time in which it is written: "[Orwell's] 1984 is about 1948. Neuromancer is about the Reagan '80s", he has said elsewhere.

And Spook Country, with its malignant iPods, its mysterious GPS tracking systems, its text littered with brand-names and model types, its fractured, jigsaw puzzle of a narrative tapping out a tale of global power, corruption and disillusionment, what else could it be but Gibson's take on terra firma circa 2007.

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Originally posted by UberDog:
These reproters almost never get anything new out of him. I would like to see some more original questions posed. Like whether or not, when he fights Neil Gaiman, will his considerable height and reach advantage offest Neil's leather jacket?