That novel – which, fans of Gibson’s strangely little-filmed canon will be pleased to hear, is about to be adapted for Amazon Prime by the team that made Westworld – is set between a London of the early 22nd century, after an unspecified apocalypse called the Jackpot has wiped out 80% of the population, and a near future town in rural America. Agency reprises the setup and many of the characters of his last book, The Peripheral. He retconned, in other words, what was originally intended to be a standalone work into something that is now more straightforwardly a sequel than anything else in his canon. I had a framework that was coming together.” And having had that passing thought, I thought – wait a minute! Verity is in a stub. That something had split off and that things weren’t supposed to be this way. But eventually I realised that I wanted to believe I was living in a stub. All I could do was read the news feed and feel worse about that. And it really threw me – for about six months.

“I thought, you know, this is never going to happen. But how could he make them fit into a post-Trump world?

He had his heroine, Verity, and her encounter with Eunice – the AI entity around whom much of the novel’s plot revolves. He went through “at least two hard publishing deadlines” as he tried to find a way of bringing it back to life. For a long time he didn’t think the book that was to become Agency could be salvaged. This latest twist in reality – Trump’s election – meant Gibson had to go to back to the drawing board with the new book, just as he had with Pattern Recognition. Just last week, Dominic Cummings – a fan – referenced Gibson’s character Hubertus Bigend in a Downing Street job advert. Gibson was on to all these things when Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker was still in short trousers. Virtual digital spaces, artificial intelligence, corporations superseding nation states, extreme body modification, and the insane metastasis of the marketing and branding industries. Two or three generations of readers have now seen the futures he envisaged in his three trilogies of novels coming dismayingly into being around them. Probably the most influential living writer of speculative fiction, his best known aphorism is “the future’s already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed”. That said, Gibson’s futures have always got a little tangled up with the present.

The Peripheral by William Gibson