We are time travellers, all of us, waking up each morning slightly farther into the future.

In 1984, William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his novel “Neuromancer,” a book whose bold imaginings were like the dreams of the as-yet-unborn Internet: it did not grow up to be quite as it had dreamed, but the dream was so powerful that it shaped the course of the Web, or at least the course of ideas about the Web.

“Neuromancer” was set well into the 21st century; “Virtual Light,” a later Gibson book written in 1993, was set in 2005—we’ve already sailed past it. “Pattern Recognition,” from 2003, was set in the then-present, so that’s even farther gone. Completing this trend, William Gibson’s new book, “Spook Country,” is actually deliberately set last year, in 2006.

What kind of science fiction is set in the past?

Maybe it isn’t science fiction at all. Gibson’s writing is resplendent with world-building details, peopled intricately and colorfully with brands, logos, trends, and technologies which are part of the charm that he weaves, whether his stories are set in an imaginary place or a real America.

His worlds are beautiful, too:  beautiful in their ambiguity, beautiful in their spinning systems of light and dark, as if beauty is the one main thing that he sees in even a broken world. Great writing helps us understand our world, whether it’s set in the future or not.

“Spook Country” follows the paths of an ex-pop star turned journalist who has been hired by a start-up magazine that no one is certain exists; of a young Russian-Chinese immigrant from Cuba who has been trained his whole life as a sort of ground-level operative or spy; and of a drug addict, being held in loose captivity for his skill as a translator.

Their fates revolve around a mystery: there is a shipping container that has been at sea for years, somehow never touching shore, just moving from boat to boat; sometimes, though, it sends out a signal with its coordinates, and can be traced briefly before it disappear again. Most of the characters have no idea what’s in it, or where it might be going.

Along the way we see LEGO robots, and art built using the GPS grid, and a lot of subtle thought about how the world works these days.

And that’s why maybe this is science fiction after all. If one purpose of science fiction is to explore the implications of new technologies, then it’s entirely fitting that today’s science fiction be set a year in the past, since technology has come to move so fast that it sweeps past us in wave after wave, and we don’t even understand the world of 12 months ago—we have not even had time to fully consider it. This is what Gibson does so beautifully, looks at the tiny pieces of the world and examines how they fit together, how they work, what their effects are, whether those pieces are people or art or specific applications of new technologies.

Someone who began in science fiction has a leg up when writing about our present world. Gone are the days when writers could afford to be technophobes and claim to really understand our culture, steeped as it now is in invisible waves, glowing screens and trillions of calculations.

“Spook Country” is a fascinating and satisfying exploration of the so-recent past, told with a fullness and luminosity that is a hallmark of Gibson’s writing.