When I first heard that the Department of Homeland Security had brought in a group of science fiction writers to brainstorm new ways that terrorists might attack America, something changed for me forever. I realized this was one of the first news stories I had ever totally believed — in part because it was like something from fiction. Even if it hadn’t happened yet, it could happen, and therefore probably would. In a late-capitalist marketplace where you can buy or sell almost anything, including artificial islands in Dubai (Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt apparently bought one in the shape of Ethiopia), nothing feels impossible. And in a world where fiction is becoming indistinguishable from reality, as the philosopher Baudrillard suggested, the flow of “truth” goes both ways. It’s just as likely that fiction will come true as it is that the truth will turn out to have been fiction all along.

This borderland territory between unlikely truths and likely falsehoods is where William Gibson’s fiction has always resided, since his first novel, “Neuromancer,” was published in 1984. In that novel, Gibson imagined (and named) cyber­space, long before most people had even contemplated the kind of computer networks we have today. But since then, the time it takes an idea to travel from fiction through uncertainty to reality has shrunk drastically. Gibson used to write about an imagined future; now he writes about a half-imagined, half-real present in which it is almost impossible to tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined. When he name-checked the Adidas GSG9 boot in a recent novel, one interviewer assumed it was made up. But it is real, and genuinely named after the German special forces. Such is fashion — but we’ll come to that. The “Matrix” films, which were partly inspired by Gibson’s early work, proposed the idea that it would be impossible for humans to tell the difference between fiction and reality if one resembled the other to the point of a perfect simulacrum. Of course, in those films, humans saw “glitches” in the Matrix: patterns that existed because the world wasn’t simply random but had been programmed. Among other things, Gibson’s recent fiction explores the idea that our world now is also programmed, in the sense that most of it is encoded as “information” in zeroes and ones, and therefore has patterns and glitches of its own. The logical machine that will encode the world is already here, but it doesn’t send bots to fly around shooting at people as it does in the films. Instead, it emotionlessly captures every Google search, every product anyone buys on eBay and, disturbingly, every recorded image of people walking around public places — especially in Britain, where closed-circuit TV cameras are ubiquitous and where Gibson has set his new novel, “Zero History.”

Since everything is wired up to everything else, it becomes possible to see glitches, connections, coincidences and all kinds of “trending” around mass-market commodities like pop music, soft drinks, sportswear and, of course, fashion, which is the main subject of Gibson’s new novel. But significant cultural nodes aren’t always exactly where you’d expect to find them, and in “Zero History” there is an interesting intersection between military clothing and fashion. Hubertus Bigend wants to get involved, somehow, in marketing apparel to the newly unfashionable United States military. “Having invented so much of contemporary masculine cool in the midcentury,” Gibson explains, “they found themselves competing with their own historical product, reiterated as streetwear. They needed help.”