William Gibson lives in an overwhelmingly green suburb with old-money roots south of Vancouver’s downtown, and it is in this suburb that I am currently wandering, looking for William Gibson. Yesterday, over lunch, he’d given me an address that seems not to actually exist, and just a minute ago, over the phone, he gave me a real address that wasn’t his. I know this because I’m standing in front of a massive gated house, the kind of house in which a reclusive beverage magnate might live, marveling at the elaborate hedges, when Gibson appears behind me. He’s laughing.

"I’m not that rich," he says, apologizing for the confusion. He’s wearing wire-framed glasses and has a kind of severe oracular thinness that complements his severe six-foot-four-inch height. At 66 he is permanently bent over, breaking-wave-shaped, the result of a lifetime of leaning down to listen. He points across the street at a more modest but still quite stately home where he actually lives.

Inside it’s Arts and Crafts-y, wood floored, quiet. We sit in the living room, and without ceremony he picks up where we left off the day before.

"I figured out the two things where I was most dumbstruck," Gibson says. "The two questions were: Was I thinking about retiring? Which I still haven’t got my head around. But the other one, which I think is gonna be the big one when I tour with this book"—The Peripheral, his tenth and most recent novel—"is: Have I been too terribly bleak, or do I think the world is absolutely fucked?"

And do you?

"I don’t have an answer for that yet," Gibson says, the light slanting through his windows. "In retrospect, I think I wrote the book to try to find out."

We all should probably hope William Gibson doesn’t think the world is fucked. In the thirty years since the publication of his first novel, Neuromancer, he’s gotten plenty wrong about the future but also an unsettling amount of it right. We have Neuromancer to thank for making ubiquitous the word cyberspace, which Gibson described as "a consensual hallucination"—still maybe the best description of whatever it is we now spend most of our days doing. Since then, in books like Virtual Light (1993) and Idoru (1996), he’s imagined a pretty convincing facsimile of modern reality television, long before the advent of anything that actually resembled modern reality television; a cure for AIDS that increasingly seems like a way we will in fact finally cure AIDS (Virtual Light again); and a whole host of other now familiar ideas about nanotechnology and viral marketing and drones shaped like silvery penguins that swim through the air (2010’s Zero History; yes, they do exist).