Vancouver-based sci-fi writer William Gibson has just released a new novel, Zero History. (Michael O'Shea)

Long before he began writing stories about imaginary futures – or, more recently, stories about our not-so-imaginary present – William Gibson realized there was something strange about how we perceived people of different eras.

Like its two predecessors, Zero History is about the unpredictable and sometimes dangerous ways in which art and commerce can collide.

“When I was a kid, I would notice how the costumes in movie westerns changed over time,” says the 62-year-old author in a recent phone interview from a coffee shop near his home in Vancouver. “Each era had its own interpretation of what a cowboy wore – they varied wildly. I really noticed it when cowboys started getting distressed and having holes in their jeans and sweat stains. Then I’d go back and see a ’40s western on television and their clothes were spotless. Those were dry-cleaned cowboys!”

The sight of the impeccably polished likes of Roy Rogers got the young Gibson thinking about “how we interpret things,” whether those things happened to be in the past, the present or times to come. The fact that this eureka moment was inspired by a sartorial matter would also foreshadow the writer’s recent decision to examine matters of dress more closely.

His new book, Zero History, is the final entry in a trilogy of novels that began with Pattern Recognition (2003), and marked the renowned science fiction author’s first excursion into a contemporary setting. The follow-up to Spook Country (2007), Zero History takes place in a strange but fascinating intersection between the worlds of fashion, business and modern warfare. Hollis Henry, a character introduced in Spook Country, is a former rock singer who has been enlisted in the search for the fashion designer responsible for an especially coveted and secretive brand named Gabriel Hounds. Like the reader, Hollis is not entirely clear why the brand is so useful to her boss Hubertus Bigend, the enigmatic corporate maverick who has been the trilogy’s most reliably entertaining character. But it’s got to do with a scheme to land contracts for military clothing, a business prospect valuable enough to attract a potentially deadly competitor.

That Gibson expresses such a keen interest in the fine details of making jackets and jeans may come as a surprise to readers who know him as an architect of cyberspace (in his landmark 1985 debut, Neuromancer) or an early engineer of steampunk (in 1990’s Difference Engine). He says he’s always been interested in fashion, albeit from a somewhat sociological standpoint.

“It’s something that I’ve always had a little bit of fluency in,” he says. “That’s probably because I grew up in a tiny little backwater place in southwestern Virginia and then found myself in cities through the rest of my life. So I always had a practical interest in decoding the information that people use in urban settings to identify themselves to other people and to identify other people, which is what we basically do with clothing.”

(Penguin)

It all comes from the same human impulse to customize our public selves for particular purposes. What’s more, that impulse generates a huge amount of money, which makes the world of fashion as rife with villainy as any other arena of human activity.

“I imagine that if you go to Paris during Fashion Week and you look at it with a certain professional eye, one of the things you would see would be an enormous amount of very serious and, in some cases, very dirty, industrial espionage,” says Gibson. “The information is literally worth billions and billions of dollars.”

Gibson says he took a “perverse delight” in treating the industry with a degree of seriousness that it is rarely accorded. “We almost have a cultural taboo about that, at least in North America. We’re not supposed to think about that too much – it’s less than trivial. I found that very interesting, because anywhere you go, on any street in the world, it’s not trivial – it’s really important to almost everyone! Yet somehow we are in denial about that. Whenever I see that sort of reluctance to discuss something, my satirical module lights up.”

Like its two predecessors, Zero History is very much about the unpredictable and sometimes dangerous ways in which art and commerce can collide. Gibson’s notion that the tentacles of the military-industrial complex could extend into vintage clothing fairs serves as a sly comment on vertical integration in our increasingly militarized, post-9/11 world. As he says, “It’s all grist for the same mill.”

The new book also serves as a satisfying finale to Gibson’s trilogy. With his last three novels, Gibson has crafted a savvy survey of the contemporary cultural landscape — a considerable task given how rapidly the ground continues to shift beneath our feet.

“When I was finished Pattern Recognition, I heaved a great sigh and said to myself, ‘Well, if ever there was a stand-alone, one-off novel, that’s it! Now it’s time for something completely different.’” He laughs. “I can’t imagine planning a novel, let alone planning three volumes of something over a decade. The only way I know how to do it is to erect it to a certain state, and then just sees which way it rolls naturally. The whole thing is lateral for me.”

Likewise, he’s sometimes just as surprised as readers to discover the weighty themes that are concealed beneath the fabric of his texts like so many expensive undergarments.

“My own sense of what I do is not conceptual,” says Gibson. “I wouldn’t deny at all there are valid conceptual interpretations, but for me, it’s not as though I have an idea and then execute something in hope of representing it. I execute to find the ideas, and usually I find them long after the fact of having executed the work.”

Gibson appears at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors on Oct. 26 and Oct. 27. He also performs readings in Montreal on Oct. 29 and Oct. 31 and in Victoria on Nov. 1.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.