His reasons for leaving science fiction behind are many. For a start, there's his much-quoted bon mot: "The future is already here - it's just unevenly distributed." I ask him if perhaps it's because there isn't a future to see and he shrugs: "I don't find it at all imaginable." Still, he says, it's fun to be able to write about the 21st century without having to make it up. "Here we are," he smiles. "And how much stranger it is than anyone imagined it to be." Though he does have his own blog (williamgibsonbooks.com) and a noted propensity to Google, somewhat surprisingly he regards the Net as "simply a welcome distraction from creating elaborate narratives that might convince a reader to turn the page."

Some argue that his first novel, Neuromancer, imagined the World Wide Web itself, but he insists that no one "envisioned the Internet until it happened." On the other hand, the new economy of the high-net-worth individual (a crucial facet of Spook Country) is something he believes he did predict in the earlier work.

Back then, he used Mexico City as a template - a city where there were only the very rich and the very poor, a place where the middle class had been excised. "Now, Manhattan is in the preserve of the very wealthy and the looming version of London with no one inside the M25 except the super-rich may not be too far-fetched." He pauses, then adds: "Vancouver is the same: Strathcona was a bargain for what? Two weeks?" Vancouver makes its William Gibson debut in Spook Country, something that gave the author a few sleepless nights. "I had real anxiety about it," he admits. "But when I got the characters all here, I realized I had three quite different and foreign viewpoints that each opened up a side of the city I hadn't really seen before. It turned out to be a lot of fun."