Clichés crop up for a reason. It has become one to say of William Gibson’s near-future novels that he has a genius for picking out the seeds of future in the present, that he writes about the world we already know as if it were science fiction. I remember reading his Pattern Recognition in 2007, when I had a job as a shop-girl in a cyberpunk warehouse in Camden Lock Market in London and feeling the hairs on the back of my arms rise on the bus to work when I came to his description of the Lock as a “Children’s Crusade,” full of shuffling teenagers up from the provinces to buy overpriced pieces of space-kitch and fake fur boleros.
Yes, the lumpen shop fronts with their weird plaster statues of boots and bangles really did look a bit like they’d been modelled by a giant toddler out of plasticine. At the warehouse, we specialised in flogging plastic cyberware headsets and bits of tacky Japanalia to teenagers with pocket money to spare on the debris of the future everyone expected in 1987, 20 years on. We got timed for toilet breaks and occasionally fired for playing with the nerf guns on our breaks. It was the worst job I’ve ever had, and because the shop and the young punks who flocked to it were a paean to his aesthetic, I blame William Gibson for almost all of it.