In addressing the failures and transgressions of cyberpunk, both real and imagined, no single writer has more to answer for than William Gibson. Perhaps this is why Gibson's 1990s follow-up to the Sprawl trilogy so conspicuously shunned cyberspace as a setting and instead seemed to attempt a more meat-centric cyberpunk. Virtual Light (1993) dropped the VR-style interface of Neuromancer and instead presciently explored the possibilities of what would later be called ‘augmented reality’ (AR). The plotline that developed in its sequels Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999), furthermore, turned the disembodiment fantasy on its head by downloading the consciousness of an AI into a nano-engineered meat body. Still more fiction by Gibson not only shuns immersive virtual realties and other technological conventions of his earlier sf, but heartily embraces the postcyberpunk ethic of ‘predicting the present’ in realistic, stranger-than-fiction contemporary settings.

One scene from 2007's Spook Country – typical of the new, don't-callit- sf Gibson – in particular suggests an attempt to explain the trajectory and import of the author's own career as a technocultural extrapolator. It features an interview between arts journalist Hollis Henry and new-media artist/producer Bobby Chombo, who combines geolocation technology with mobile AR displays to create ‘locative’ art: 3D animated virtual objects tagged to specific geographical locations, invisible to the naked eye but visible at those locations via AR interface. The artworks themselves are files posted online and accessed wirelessly, so that users with a wireless network connection and an AR headset, who know the URL for the file and the GPS coordinates to which it corresponds, can ‘see’ the piece – though no one else can. Bobby envisions a near future in which wearable computers and displays will democratize audience access to a locative art scene; artists will host the files and GPS links on their own sites, in effect publishing real-time AR feeds to which audiences can subscribe. Switching from one feed to another will be like surfing between different realities, but without leaving your body or even your neighborhood: ‘Each one shows you a different world […] The world we walk around in would be channels.’