In William Gibson's new book, games lead to time travel

Science fiction fans consider William Gibson a master.

With books like "Neuromancer," in which he popularized "cyberpunk," Gibson has developed a wide following of readers who are taken by his depictions of future worlds.

But a few years ago he says he had to pause and, as he puts it, "recalibrate."

"I sometimes would sort of glance, as it were, out the window, or more likely at the internet, and think 'Whoa! The weirdness I am making up isn't that much weirder than the weirdness I am seeing in the world today," he said.

He wrote three novels set in the present, to get a better sense of where the world is going. That gave him the tools to take on his latest book "The Peripheral," in which not only does he return to the future, he also re-imagines time travel in a way that makes it seem a very real possibility.

"Sort of like 'Winter's Bone' with better smart phones," he said recently. "Or 'Justified' with more drones."

In a 7 p.m. visit to the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Edina today, Gibson will read from the book, which centers on Flynn, a young woman in London who makes a living playing video games for other people.

Flynn takes a job not realizing she is no longer playing a game, but controlling a robot called a "peripheral" 70 years in her future. However when she witnesses a murder, people in that future reach back to ask her for help solving the crime.

Initially Gibson wasn't thinking about a time travel story. The idea occurred to him on a trip to see a friend in London who told him how the rich and powerful control the city.

"I don't know to this day if he was making things up for the benefit of a naive American, which he is whimsical enough to do, or whether he was telling me the truth," Gibson said. "It doesn't really matter."

By the time Gibson returned to his hotel that night he knew where his book was going.

"I had this whole thing in my head that Flynn was going to be communicating with this incredibly decadent and powerful future London," he said.

Flynn doesn't use a time machine to travel across the years, but a mysterious server located somewhere in China. The author initially worried that using the Internet for time travel might seem hokey.

"Because you'll think 'Oh, they are just emailing,'" he said. "But in our world today you can be a little kid in Afghanistan walking down the road and you can be killed by this very complex digital interaction with a man in a hangar outside of Las Vegas."

Gibson doesn't always make it easy for readers of "The Peripheral." As in his earlier books, he plunges into the new worlds he's created with only oblique clues as to what he's talking about — the kind of challenge he likes as a reader.

"Being initially completely lost and experiencing something that I hope is very akin to extreme culture shock and just being a stranger in a strange land," he said. "And over the course of 50, or 60, or a hundred pages, getting it."

Gibson has become convinced that science fiction is really about the time when a work is written rather than the future. However he does see one significant change.

"Something that has happened in my lifetime is our communal sense of 'now' has grown ever briefer," he said.

As a boy he said, "now" would have meant the duration of a presidential term.

"But 'now' is now less than a single news cycle," he said. "It's the time it takes twitter to refresh."

Science fiction or not, that means the future is coming much faster.