Steampunk is more than mere fantasy. It’s all around us. In many cities, the petti­coats of Victorian buildings brush up against Wi-Fi hot spots, and if you want to time travel, all you have to do is walk down a street and open your eyes. In Tokyo, Gibson detects “successive layers of Tomorrowlands, older ones showing through when the newer ones start to peel.” Lurking in the back corner of a noodle stall, he watches a man playing with his phone. The gadget is glossy, “complexly curvilinear, totally ephemeral-looking,” shining with “Blade Runner”-ish reflections of the city around it. Gibson zooms in on an accessory hanging from the phone — a “rosarylike anti­cancer charm.” According to Japanese pop-­culture lore, such talismans are supposed to protect against microwaves.

It’s the perfect Gibson detail: a hybrid of high technology and magic wand. Every­thing he notices seems to be a this grafted onto a that. In these essays, we see a man fascinated by objects and places containing their own contradictions. It makes sense, then, that Gibson’s novels have helped promote several portmanteau words and neologisms, like “cyberspace,” into widespread English use. This is the essence of Gibson-think — anything can be a kind of portmanteau, a glued-­together paradox.

One of the delights of “Distrust That Particular Flavor” is its autobiographical stories, in which we learn how the author’s highly original take on the future evolved. He grew up in a time of paperbacks with googly-eyed aliens on their covers, “a world of early television, a new Olds­mobile with crazy rocket-ship styling, toys with science-­fiction themes.” When Gibson was 6, his father left on a business trip and never returned: in some faraway restaurant, he choked and died. Twenty years later, the Heimlich maneuver was introduced, and asphyxiation deaths in restaurants became more or less obsolete. But locked in the 1950s, Gibson’s father couldn’t be saved.

The fatherless boy, exiled in rural Virginia, “a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted,” became a geekling with his nose always in a book — in particular, he was besotted with H. G. Wells’s “Time Machine,” a perhaps obvious choice considering the details of his father’s death. “I . . . filled a Blue Horse lined notebook with elaborate pencil sketches for my own, actual, working time machine,” he writes, adding that he decorated his diagrams with Babbage-y gears stolen from Wells’s Victorian era. He longed to explore a ruined London of the far-­distant future, its postapocalyptic landscape of secret tunnels inhabited by molelike humans.

But his interest in science fiction began to fade, he says, after the Cuban missile crisis. Schooled on Wells’s novels and other classic science fiction, he had come to expect a capital-F “Future” that would look nothing like the present — either a radioactive wasteland or a crystal city surrounded by flying cars. Thus as the world teetered on the edge of nuclear war in 1962, he prepared himself for Armageddon. After all, according to the logic of those old science-fiction books, civilization should have ended when Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off; a rain of missiles should have reduced the human race to a band of mutant survivors. Instead, the crisis fizzled, and became for him a footnote. “I can’t recall the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis at all,” Gibson writes. “My anxiety, and the world’s, reached some absolute peak. And then declined, history moving on. . . . I may actually have begun to distrust science fiction, then, or rather to trust it differently,” its sense of events seemed so far off the mark.

And so Gibson began to think about building another sort of time machine, one made of words — bolted together, spliced, enjambed. In this beguiling collection, we have the chance to travel with him as he rockets around in that machine, visiting a future that already exists.