He writes cannily about his own progress as a writer and about how the early deaths of his parents cracked his life in two and led to his interest in science fiction. He paraphrases another writer who said, “Being an only child whose parents are dead is like being the sole survivor of drowned Atlantis.”

For a writer who sets most of his fiction in the future Mr. Gibson has long been a later adopter, technologically. His avoidance of television, in particular, has served him well. About how he has written so many books, he says: “I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”

His prose can crackle. The “skinny magnetic tape” from a cassette resembled, to his young self, “new-tech angel hair.” As a tourist in Singapore he refers to himself as “a curious foreign visitor who was more than twice as tall as the average human, and who sweated slowly but continuously, like an aged cheese.”

About a pair of bespoke blue jeans worn by Skip Spence, one of the founders of Moby Grape, whom Mr. Gibson met in California in the early 1970s, he sees how they had been “jacked out of blue denim mundania entirely, into some unknown realm of Hispano-American, deeply Catholic romanticism.” He calls Spence’s style a “kind of hardcore rodeo esoterica.”

What one really wants to read Mr. Gibson on, of course, is our simmering technological present, and its future, and there are good moments to be had. He explains his longtime interest in Japan by noting that the country is “the global imagination’s default setting for the future.” He is eloquent about how the “vending machines of Tokyo constitute a secret city of solitude.”

Mr. Gibson is eloquent too about the “poignant rubbish” that floats to the surface in his fiction. I like this observation very much: “My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in 10 years’ time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop.” Mr. Gibson may be a kind of futurist, but his best eyes are for ruin.