The plot whirrs off: after beta-testing what she thinks is a new video game, Flynne witnesses a murder. A melancholy undercurrent of the book is how the inhabitants of Wilf’s world envy the inhabitants of Flynne’s seemingly more innocent age. Flynne’s world is – unknown to her – one such “stub”.

Paradox is avoided because, at the moment they make contact, that past splits off: it ceases to lead up to the present and becomes a “stub”, another fork in the timeline. The two worlds are linked because the later world contains a black-market technology, popular among hobbyists called “continua enthusiasts”, that allows people to reach into the past.

But an I’m a Celebrity-style publicity stunt goes wrong – imagine Katie Price zip-wiring into the jungle and then disembowelling Ant and Dec with her razor-sharp six-foot extendable thumbnails – and all kinds of hell break loose. One of his clients is Daedra – a post-postmodern celebrity who gets naked a lot, tattoos herself liberally, and periodically has her skin flayed and then regrown, selling miniature figurines of her previous skins to subscriber-collectors. In this world we meet Wilf Netherton, a fecklessly charming alcoholic PR man who “looked like a low-key infomercial for an unnamed product”. The streets are all but deserted – though there are androids amusing tourists in bleak Dickensian cosplay zones – and power resides in the hands of unimaginably wealthy Russian oligarchs, or “klepts”, while the police don’t like to talk about terrorism because “terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state”. The other world of the novel is a desolate London, further into the future after a hazily described apocalypse known as “the Jackpot” has wiped out 80% of the population.

And playing video games is, for lots of people, a proper job. Most of what you need you either buy at Hefty Mart or get “fabbed” at a 3D-print shop (which is where our heroine, Flynne, works). “Homes” (aka Homeland Security) is the main power in the land. The only real money in the economy comes from “building” (a perfect Gibsonian tweak) drugs. There are wounded veterans from foreign wars. We are in a smallish town in the US, where everything is more or less like it is now, only more so. The future containing Hefty Mart is just about shouting distance from our own. In this book, there are two futures to be deciphered and I should warn fans for whom the deciphering from scratch is going to be a prime pleasure that the paragraphs which follow contain some spoilers with regards to the set-up. The reader’s work is hard at first but richly satisfying.

It makes them both plausible and pleasurably strange. One of the great pleasures of Gibson’s fiction – though he is canny enough to include periodic expository info-dumps to help the confused catch up – is that sense of not being spoon-fed: his futures convince because the reader arrives in them as a tourist and learns their languages by immersion.

William gibson novel the peripheral