When Gibson published his first short story in Omni, in 1981, the writer Robert Sheckley took him to lunch and gave him two pieces of advice: never sign a multi-book contract and don’t buy an old house. Gibson ignored the latter suggestion; on my second morning in Vancouver, a rainstorm descended, and he texted to say that he needed to check his attic for leaks, inviting my assistance. (“I have a fear of doing it alone,” he texted, lest “the ladder fall over.”)

“It’s coming down hard,” Gibson said, when I arrived. “Luckily, I’ve got the perfect jacket for you.” In writing “Virtual Light” and its sequels, he’d learned to harness his obsessions, among them garments and their semiotic histories.

In the hall, he relieved me of my misjudged chore coat, and handed me a recent reproduction of Eddie Bauer’s 1936 Skyliner down jacket: a forerunner of the down-filled B-9 flight suit, worn by aviators during the Second World War. Boxy and beige, its diamond-quilted nylon was rigid enough to stand up on its own. When I put it on, it made me about four inches wider. Gibson shrugged into a darkly futuristic tech-ninja shell by Acronym, the Berlin-based atelier, constructed from some liquidly matte material.

“You have to dress for the job,” he said.

“It’s that time of year again, when the air smells of relatives.” Facebook

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Shopping Cartoon by Mary Lawton

We ventured into the verdant back yard, retrieving an eight-foot ladder from the garage. Carefully, we carried the ladder through the house and up a winding, skylit central staircase. Gibson’s height allowed him to casually open the attic door. I watched his rose-colored Chucks disappear into the hole. When I ascended, I found him lit by a small window, balancing gracefully on the joists, carrying a bucket heavy with water.

“Thank you very much,” he said, handing it to me.

As it happened, a closet in a room off the hallway contained Gibson’s Acronym collection. (He is friends with the co-founder and designer of Acronym, Errolson Hugh, and was briefly involved, as a consultant, in the creation of Arc’teryx Veilance, a futuristic, or perhaps merely presentist, outerwear line that Hugh helped design.) As a longtime Acronym lurker—I don’t own any, but would like to—I was curious to see the jackets, which enable excessive, even fantastic levels of functionality. “This is something Errolson calls the ‘escape zip,’ ” Gibson said, indicating an unusual zipper along the jacket’s shoulder, and demonstrating how it could be used to enact an instantaneous, overhanded dejacketing. Another coat, long and indefinably gray-green, was seductively sinister—the most cyberpunk object I’d seen in Gibson’s home. “This is this weird membrane that Gore-Tex makes,” he said, rubbing the fabric—leather-like on one side, synthetic on the other—between his fingers. “Errolson gave it to me when they hadn’t named it yet. I was trying to come up with a name. . . .”

“This is what I imagine the scary hit man wearing, in ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’ ” I said.

“Oh, the scary hit man, yeah!” Gibson said. “I’m delighted to have this jacket, but it’s hard to wear it. It’s almost too effective. It absorbs too much light.” He enjoys wearing the future, but fears full cosplay.

Satisfied, Gibson returned the jacket to the closet. Biggles watched from the landing as we carried the ladder and the bucket down the stairs. Techno-fabric and a leaky roof: the real future.

Was Gibson afraid of what the future held? Like anyone, he lived in the present, awaiting tomorrow. By the end of the nineties, he’d taken up Pilates and given up smoking. Claire lived nearby; so did Graeme, who has autism, and a savant-like ability to play hundreds of musical instruments. Gibson and Deborah had helped him build a secure life. (Gibson drops by every day, and often shares Graeme’s birding photographs on Twitter.)

He had reason to be concerned about a rising F.Q. But he managed to keep that concern contained within his writing life. “Bill’s always been able to shut the door in his head,” Jack Womack, one of Gibson’s oldest friends, said. Womack is also a Southerner—he’s from Lexington, Kentucky—and a science-fiction writer. For decades, Gibson has sent his drafts to Womack, who’s based in New York, every few days—at first by fax, and in later years by e-mail. “I’ve always perceived him as someone who takes everything in before making a decision,” Womack continued. “Not paranoid, not suspicious. Just a good poker player.” Writing near-future science fiction, Womack said, requires “detachment.” It’s like living during the Cold War with knowledge of the bomb.

And yet Gibson seemed, at the turn of the century, to be growing dissatisfied with being detached. When “All Tomorrow’s Parties” was finished, “I felt a little let down,” he said. “Not with how the book had turned out, but there was something about the experience. . . . It was beginning to seem as though I was doing something that belonged to a previous era.” He wondered if science fiction, as a genre, might be yellowing with age. He was certainly aging: at fifty, he’d begun cognitive-behavioral therapy, hoping to process the unconfronted experiences of his childhood. Meanwhile, he said, “things were different. The world outside the window was beginning to look considerably stranger to me than the ones I was imagining for my fictional futures.”

Unsure how to proceed, Gibson bided his time. He flew back and forth to London, working on a screenplay for “Neuromancer,” which had been optioned for a film. He spent time on eBay—the first Web site that felt to him like a real place, perhaps because it was full of other people and their junk. Through eBay, he discovered an online watch forum, and, through the forum, he developed some expertise in military watches. He learned of a warehouse in Egypt from which it was possible to procure extinct Omega components; he sourced, for the forum membership, a particular kind of watch strap, the G10, which had originally been manufactured in the nineteen-seventies and had since become obscure. (A version of it, known as the NATO strap, is now wildly popular in menswear circles.) Gibson noticed that people with access to unlimited information could develop illusions of omniscience. He got into a few political debates on the forum. He felt the F.Q. creeping upward.

The advent of the online world, he thought, was changing the physical one. In the past, going online had felt like visiting somewhere else. Now being online was the default: it was our Here, while those awkward “no service” zones of disconnectivity had become our There. Checking his Vancouver bank balance from an A.T.M. in Los Angeles struck him suddenly as spooky. It didn’t matter where you were in the landscape; you were in the same place in the datascape. It was as though cyberspace were turning inside out, or “everting”—consuming the world that had once surrounded it.

In Japan, he had learned the word otaku, used to describe people with obsessive, laserlike interests. The Web, he saw, allowed everyone everywhere to develop the same otaku obsessions—with television, coffee, sneakers, guns. The mere possibility of such knowledge lay like a scrim over the world. A physical object was also a search term: an espresso wasn’t just an espresso; it was also Web pages about crema, fair trade, roasting techniques, varieties of beans. Things were texts; reality had been augmented. Brand strategists revised the knowledge around objects to make them more desirable, and companies, places, Presidents, wars, and people could be advantageously rebranded, as though the world itself could be reprogrammed. It seemed to Gibson that this constant reprogramming, which had become a major driver of economic life, was imbuing the present with a feeling—something like fatigue, or jet lag, or loss.