William Gibson, Putnam, 2010, 404 pages.

William Gibson’s writing career is an eerie mirror of our dreams of the future, and thus, our present.

His first set of books, kicked off by 1984’s “Neuromancer,” took place deep in the 21st century, a science-fiction exploration of a high-technology, “Blade Runner”-esque society in which he coined the term “cyberspace.” The influence of these early works is hard to overstate; while the Internet did not develop exactly as he imagined, it is arguable that his imaginings of it helped shape its development and how we picture it, even today.

His next set of books were written in the 1990s and set just after the millennium, a dream of a few years in the future that is long gone by for us now, but his most recent books take place, deliberately, just yesterday. It’s as if the future and present have become compacted, and haven’t they? What bold new world do we imagine that technology will bring us 50 years from now? Doesn’t it seem banal to speculate on the future when we have not even made sense of the present? In the now, we are swarmed by black-box technology and invisible waves, codes and systems and secret architectures that only the otaku understand, and that none understand completely. The mysteries of the science-fiction future have exploded sideways in a fractal mushroom cloud of information and wonder, leaving a fine, puzzling, glittering dust over all of us, and it is this glitter that Gibson excavates.

“Zero History” sees the return of a number of characters from recent Gibson books: Hollis Henry, the Aimee Mann-esque rock star turned writer who is drawn into the world of Hubertus Bigend, a wealthy Dutch marketing magnate and seeker of hidden things. Back also is Milgrim, once a junkie, now a person so clean and new he’s like a Martian on 21st century Earth. All are drawn toward each other by invisible patterns in a post-economic collapse global economy, and spend a great deal of time doing things with their iPhones.

“Zero History” is the least science-fictiony of all Gibson’s books, yet somehow it shares the same soul as all his work. The mystery that launches the story is that of a “secret brand,” a line of clothing referred to as “Gabriel Hounds” with global reach but no marketing. Not guerilla marketing, but no marketing at all—the absence of promotion or concern for success, barely even a logo, just the sheer magical appeal of something well made that comes from outside the system, an anti-brand. The search for and exploration of this anti-brand is not only a look at how we value objects in our culture, but it also makes one really want a new pair of pants.

Maybe William Gibson was never actually a science fiction writer, at all. Maybe he was only ever an author fascinated by culture, and one of the few to understand just how deeply our culture is defined by technology. Now that we live just ahead of the curve of the possible, trying constantly to understand what just happened to us, his fiction shines a unique light on who we are.