"THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE; it is just unevenly distributed," is one of William Gibson's most famous dictums. Zero History, his most recent novel, is perhaps best understood as science fiction of the present, a representation of this hyperreal moment in which we live surrounded by our technology, no longer — as Marxist critic Fredric Jameson laments — able to imagine a future. In Zero History Gibson, though, unlike Jameson, offers reasons for hope in this SF-saturated present, directing his penetrating powers of observation to capture the textures of this strangely familiar, uncannily alien world.

Gibson first gained fame as the father of cyberpunk fiction, coining the term "cyberspace" before it became what he called the "mass consensual hallucination" of the digital age. Neuromancer (1984), the poster-child of this cultural ethos, was famously written on a typewriter, despite the novel's setting in the heady, disembodied realm of the matrix. Gibson has most recently been praised for Pattern Recognition (2003), his first novel set in the present and the first in the Blue Ant trilogy which Zero History concludes. Reviews of Pattern Recognition celebrated Gibson's move from SF to mainstream fiction, an attribution that overlooks the axiom that SF is always-already about the moment of its production, not about the future. Thus, it's not really that Gibson has given up writing SF; rather, the world he has been describing throughout his career has manifested around us in the quotidian experience we take for granted. Although the technological milieu of Zero History is thus mundane, the interpenetration of human experience with technological media — perhaps the topic of Gibson's entire career — is catalogued and analyzed with the forensic exactness and poetic grace we have come to expect of the author. Indeed, while he deserves his status as chronicler of the information age, the sense of unease with the era embodied in the story of Neuromancer's typewriter remains: Gibson captures our era in sentences as carefully constructed as hand-made jewelry, yet he remains estranged from it, nostalgic for an earlier time and its illusion, at least, of simpler truths.

Zero History  is fully a novel of the twenty-first century. Its technology is the network of GPS grids, iPhone apps, and ubiquitous surveillance we daily negotiate in the West. Its sites of anxiety are not artificial intelligences, mysterious Japanese corporations, or organ harvesters, but the impersonal forces of normalized security alerts, neoliberalism, and omnipresent advertising. One could call it a dystopia, and yet the necessary pivot point from which to turn and look through the fictional world and back upon our own is absent. Things are not differently dystopian in Zero History, but — in another telling Gibson phrase — "things are things." If the SPRAWL trilogy — Neuromancer, Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) — announced the arrival of a hip, youthful, disaffected, and at-least-posturingly radical outsider hero, the Blue Ant trilogy embraces instead the more staid perspective of the middle-aged: suspicious of trends, under no illusions that they will master systems rather than vice versa, and accommodated to a world designed neither for their needs nor their dre...