He spoke to me from his home in Vancouver. His essay for this series was supplemented with a phone interview. William Gibson is author of ten other novels-most recently, Zero History and Spook Country.

Gibson takes us towards a world shaped by today’s nascent technologies, exploring how the encroachment of technology onto-and into-our bodies may change what it means to be human. The novel mines the anxieties that haunt 2014’s hyperconnected masses, imagining what drones, 3D printing, and virtual reality will look like decades down the line. Set in the near future, The Peripheral centers on a gamer named Flynn, who discovers that the virtual worlds she beta-tests may be more than fantasy. His classic first book Neuromancer (1984), which debuted the same year as the MacIntosh computer, glimpsed the World Wide Web a decade before its advent and famously coined the term “cyberspace.” In our interview, he explained why forcing the reader to grapple with new technological vocabularies-even in a first sentence-is a central aspect of his work. If Gibson is one of the most respected living authors of science fiction, it’s in part because of the spooky prescience of his imagined futures. In a conversation for this series, Gibson explained how first sentences invite the writer, too: they contain a blueprint for the book that will be written.

What happens in the first moments of a book? For William Gibson, author of The Peripheral, a kind of invitation is extended-and readers will or won’t feel what he calls “the click.” But it’s not just about connecting with an audience.

Gibson spook country