William Gibson made his name writing science fiction that foresaw our dependence on electronics; the term ‘cyberspace’ is generally agreed to have appeared first in a story he published in 1982. He now deals in jaunty modern-day thrillers whose frames of reference include pop music, couture and site-specific art, in addition to more traditional concerns like global finance and the military-industrial complex. Zero History, his tenth novel, revisits Hubertus Bigend, the louche Belgian advertising guru we met in Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007). With help from Hollis Henry, a retired rock star, and Milgrim, a languages graduate who has spent the past decade hooked on prescription drugs, he’s trying to get his hands on the secret blueprint for a rare brand of Japanese denim.

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