I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes – I’m often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand. Have you ever seen Brian Eno’s deck of Oblique Strategies? One of them is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” That’s my favorite. [At a] hotel in New York a couple of days ago, the young woman who checked me in said what sounded to me like, “Thank you, sir; my name is Tyranny. If there’s anything you need …” I’m not enough of an extrovert to go, “Your name’s what?” … For the rest of the day, I was thinking of young, benevolent female characters with the first name “Tyranny.” Possibly an Asian character, where it’s kind of an ESL issue. Those things inspire me, but what you’re talking about is a result of the process of composition having spun itself up to a certain wonderfully flaky level, where it says something that I transcribe without quite being able to understand it. I’ve learned to trust that, and it seldom lets me down. Occasionally if I look back at something I’ve written I’ll find one of those that I don’t understand, but that’s a bad thing – the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.

Last night [fellow science fiction author] Rob Sawyer pointed out how opposite his idea of creativity was to what I describe in the introduction to this book. He said that he had to be able to decide beforehand what [a book] was about, how he was going to do it, and then as he went along, he would compare what he was composing to this directive that he had arrived at prior to the work. To me, that’s absolutely incomprehensible; the part of me that sits here having this conversation with you is incapable of doing any very original literary work. The part of me that creates stuff is right now largely offline and unavailable, and I couldn’t summon it if my life depended on it. I have to make myself available and hope it turns up. To me, that’s where the good stuff comes from.

As William Burroughs liked to say, “A writer always gets his pound of flesh.” No matter what I’m going through, I can always step back and go, “This is material.” [He pulls out his iPad, encased in a black sleeve, and calls up a picture he took of a house in Key West with strange curved shutters that open out into awning-like structures.] I could get a whole novel out of that house. That’s got some mojo going on! Not just the window, but the front door has got at least one layer of inch-thick plywood, no hinges.

I’m a fairly visual writer; I can get an awful lot out of really closely examining a photograph like that. It’s a very interesting exercise that I would recommend to anyone. Take any photograph – preferably a photograph that contains relatively little information (no humans or animals in it) – and catalog everything visible. It usually can’t be done in less than a thousand words, and it can’t be done well in less than about two [thousand]. It always leaves me thinking that pictures really are worth a thousand words, at least, that the visual matrix is so incredibly rich with stuff and meaning, that there’s actually no place to stop. People who have tried it find they stop because they just get exhausted.

By PAGAN KENNEDY  l  New York Times Jan.13, 2012

On one of his trips to New York, William Gibson stopped before an antiques shop that would end up haunting him. He tried the door. It was locked. Over the years, he searched for the shop window many times — it seemed to wander around SoHo and materialize on unpredictable streets. When­ever he peered through it at the treasures within, he felt as if he were glimpsing the props from a dream. “There is no knowing what might appear there,” Gibson writes in one of the essays collected in “Distrust That Particular Flavor.” Once, he spied a collection of toy-size missiles.

Another time, a “florally ornate cast-iron fragment” that might have been a chunk of the Brooklyn Bridge. The window winked like a portal to another universe, yet it was real. And that’s what makes this first book of Gibson’s nonfiction so exciting. He has handed us a map to his own ­magic doorways.

Gibson is, of course, one of our greatest science-fiction writers, exalted for his talent for depicting futures that are just around the corner. His 1984 novel “Neuro­mancer” popularized the term “cyberspace,” describing the hacker-scripted fantasies of a shared digital realm. A decade later, when we all stepped into cyberspace, the word seemed just right.

Although some of his novels have an almost reportorial quality, Gibson didn’t initially intend to write nonfiction. As a young writer, “I became uncharacteristically strict with myself,” he recalls. He banned anything that wasn’t fiction from his type­writer, worrying that if he delved into essay writing, he might drain the jet fuel from his imaginary worlds. But editors kept asking him for travelogues and memoirs and literary musings. Gibson couldn’t resist, especially when the assignments involved a free airplane ticket. The pieces collected here, he confesses, are “violations of that early prime directive” to rely sheerly on invention.

I’m so glad he did cheat on the novels. In “Distrust That Particular Flavor,” Gibson pulls off a dazzling trick. Instead of predicting the future, he finds the future all around him, mashed up with the past, and reveals our own domain to us as a science-fictional marvel.

Gibson’s writing enters the bloodstream like a drug, producing a mild hallucinogenic effect that lasts for hours. In one essay (originally a talk he gave in 2008) he introduces us to “Martian jet lag,” an actual sleep disorder suffered by people whose jobs require them to stay in sync with the Red Planet: it’s “what you get when you operate one of those little RadioShack wagon/probes from a comfortable seat back at an air base in California.” In another essay, and seemingly in his own state of Martian jet lag, Gibson explores Singapore. “Disneyland with the death penalty,” he calls it, describing the country as “a relentlessly G-rated experience,” a place stuck in 1956. “The only problem being, of course, that it isn’t 1956 in the rest of the world.”

Such is the power of his prose that when I glanced up from the pages of this book and surveyed the street-side around me, I felt as if I were wearing Gibson-glasses. Cars lumbered past like ponderous elephants of rusty steel, not so different from the cars of 30 years ago, and seemed not to belong in the same world as the tattooed kid punching code into his laptop nearby. Under the spell of this book, I suddenly understood my surroundings not as a discrete contemporary tableau but as a hodgepodge of 1910, 1980, 2011 and 2020.

“The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet” — this quote is often attributed to Gibson, though no one seems to be able to pin down when or if he actually said it. Still, it neatly sums up his own particular flavor. In 1991, he and Bruce Sterling wrote a novel called “The Difference Engine,” an alternative history that takes the uneven-future idea to an extreme. In the novel, the computer revolution happens in Disraeli’s era, and the Victorians work out their calculations on steam-powered thinking machines. The book introduced a vision of “steam­punk” to a broader audience, and also anticipated a fashion movement whose enthusiasts mix corsets with goggles and pearl-­handled cellphones.

Steampunk is more than mere fantasy. It’s all around us. In many cities, the petti­coats of Victorian buildings brush up against Wi-Fi hot spots, and if you want to time travel, all you have to do is walk down a street and open your eyes. In Tokyo, Gibson detects “successive layers of Tomorrowlands, older ones showing through when the newer ones start to peel.” Lurking in the back corner of a noodle stall, he watches a man playing with his phone. The gadget is glossy, “complexly curvilinear, totally ephemeral-looking,” shining with “Blade Runner”-ish reflections of the city around it. Gibson zooms in on an accessory hanging from the phone — a “rosarylike anti­cancer charm.” According to Japanese pop-­culture lore, such talismans are supposed to protect against microwaves.

It’s the perfect Gibson detail: a hybrid of high technology and magic wand. Every­thing he notices seems to be a this grafted onto a that. In these essays, we see a man fascinated by objects and places containing their own contradictions. It makes sense, then, that Gibson’s novels have helped promote several portmanteau words and neologisms, like “cyberspace,” into widespread English use. This is the essence of Gibson-think — anything can be a kind of portmanteau, a glued-­together paradox.

One of the delights of “Distrust That Particular Flavor” is its autobiographical stories, in which we learn how the author’s highly original take on the future evolved. He grew up in a time of paperbacks with googly-eyed aliens on their covers, “a world of early television, a new Olds­mobile with crazy rocket-ship styling, toys with science-­fiction themes.” When Gibson was 6, his father left on a business trip and never returned: in some faraway restaurant, he choked and died. Twenty years later, the Heimlich maneuver was introduced, and asphyxiation deaths in restaurants became more or less obsolete. But locked in the 1950s, Gibson’s father couldn’t be saved.

The fatherless boy, exiled in rural Virginia, “a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted,” became a geekling with his nose always in a book — in particular, he was besotted with H. G. Wells’s “Time Machine,” a perhaps obvious choice considering the details of his father’s death. “I … filled a Blue Horse lined notebook with elaborate pencil sketches for my own, actual, working time machine,” he writes, adding that he decorated his diagrams with Babbage-y gears stolen from Wells’s Victorian era. He longed to explore a ruined London of the far-­distant future, its postapocalyptic landscape of secret tunnels inhabited by molelike humans.

But his interest in science fiction began to fade, he says, after the Cuban missile crisis. Schooled on Wells’s novels and other classic science fiction, he had come to expect a capital-F “Future” that would look nothing like the present — either a radioactive wasteland or a crystal city surrounded by flying cars. Thus as the world teetered on the edge of nuclear war in 1962, he prepared himself for Armageddon. After all, according to the logic of those old science-fiction books, civilization should have ended when Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off; a rain of missiles should have reduced the human race to a band of mutant survivors. Instead, the crisis fizzled, and became for him a footnote. “I can’t recall the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis at all,” Gibson writes. “My anxiety, and the world’s, reached some absolute peak. And then declined, history moving on… . I may actually have begun to distrust science fiction, then, or rather to trust it differently,” its sense of events seemed so far off the mark.

And so Gibson began to think about building another sort of time machine, one made of words — bolted together, spliced, enjambed. In this beguiling collection, we have the chance to travel with him as he rockets around in that machine, visiting a future that already exists.

In 1826, the philosopher John Stuart Mill had a nervous breakdown, and one of its causes was pretty odd. “I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations,” he wrote in his autobiography.

The octave consists only of five tones and two semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty.

In a way, Mill was being prescient: within a hundred years, serialist composers would forge onward, like the Vikings colonizing Greenland, to combinations of semi-tones that were not conventionally beautiful. But in another way, Mill was being ridiculous: no, a contemporary composer can’t use a tune that Mozart also used, unless it’s a deliberate allusion, but she can certainly use a tune that Weber also used, because no one listens to Weber any more. Mill’s nightmare of permutational famine would only be a real danger if any motif that any composer invented was registered permanently in some sort of giant musical database. Perhaps such a database does now exist, but no composer would be silly enough to check it. I only wish the same were true for narrative art.

Discovering that the website TV Tropes began as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer messageboard is like discovering that Borges’ “Library of Babel” began as a one-volume cricketer’s almanac. Since 2004, TV Tropes has swollen into a frighteningly comprehensive taxonomy of all known plot devices across all known media. Every story that’s ever thrilled you is there in microscopic cross section. In some respects it resembles books like Georges Polti’s The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations or Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots, but it’s not nearly so reductive: it’s maximalist not minimalist, always delighted to add new categories. Really, its closest cousin is the Aarne–Thompson classification system, which attempts to anatomize all the world’s folklore into about 2,500 elements. And as a writer, I find it impossible to browse TV Tropes without feeling like Mill: how will anyone ever come up with anything new?

This fear isn’t abstract. Recently, I was on the point of starting my second screenplay when I thought I might as well check at the patent office for any prior art. On the TV Tropes page for Double Reverse Quadruple Agent, I came across a listing for Cypher, a 2002 film I’d never seen by Vincenzo Natali, director of the terrific Cube. The best twist in my outline was sitting there in Cypher. Dejected, I gave up on the screenplay. TV Tropes may have saved me from wasting my time on an idea that had already been wrung dry, but it may also have prevented me from developing that idea far enough that I could find something in it that was uniquely my own. So far, the same thing hasn’t happened with my prose fiction, but perhaps it’s only a matter of time.

Of course, this is only a problem because my writing happens to be so preoccupied with plot. Most literary fiction is inoculated against TV Tropes. When Zadie Smith updates Howard’s End in On Beauty or Cynthia Ozick updates The Ambassadors in Foreign Bodies, they are assuming that the storylines are not by any means the most gripping things about those novels. I once interviewed the critic James Wood, and he told me that in his reviews he deliberately describes the entire book because he likes “destroying the tyranny of plot.” In other words, if TV Tropes gives you writer’s block, then maybe you’re not much of a writer.

And you can even make that same argument starting from the other side of the field. I recently asked the author China Miéville about TV Tropes, on which he has his own lengthy entry; because his work wallows in plot, I thought he might find the website as lethal as I do. In fact, he told me that he loves TV Tropes but he doesn’t worry about it. You don’t need a database, he said, to prove that it’s almost impossible to come up with anything truly original – just riffling through the canon will do that. Your task is just to force new tricks on old dogs. (After all, both Cypher and my abandoned screenplay were basically variations on Philip K Dick. TV Tropes itself has an entry for this called Older Than They Think.) And I agree with Miéville up to a point. But a lot of the joy of his novel The City and the City, for instance, arises from its ingenious premise. If he’d read on TV Tropes that The Twilight Zone had used the same plot in 1961, he would probably still have written his book, but I find it hard to believe he wouldn’t have been disappointed.

And the horrible thing is, it doesn’t stop there. There’s a remark somewhere by (I think) Martin Amis about how all young writers have to confront the fact that there just aren’t many new ways left to describe an autumn sky or a pretty girl. It’s like peak oil for lyricism. And in the age of Google Books and Amazon Search Inside, we have to confront this even more brutally. Every time I come up with a simile that feels like it might be too obvious, I can put it into the search box and find that a dozen romance novelists have used it before me.

The answer, I think, is to think more about your audience. The average reader just isn’t as obsessive about precedent as the average writer. She is less likely to notice an echo, and if she does notice, she is less likely to mind. In other words, she is saner. To invent some contorted new plot twist because your previous one was already on TV Tropes, or some cumbersome new metaphor because your previous one was already on Google Books, is just self-indulgence: you like your book a bit more, but everyone else likes it a bit less. It’s best to spend just enough time on TV Tropes that you’re anxious to do something original, but not so long that you’re paralyzed. That’s easier advice to give than to follow, however, and whether or not I succeed, there is one pretty humbling circumstance I have no choice but to acknowledge: that the biggest existential challenge that I currently face as a novelist comes from a website that started life as a place for people to talk about whether Buffy should really have got together with Spike.