coolhunting secret, weaponized brands to “gear queers,” viral iPhones and Twitter darknets, William Gibson’s new novel Zero History examines the 21st century’s technocultural fetishes with a deceptively simple directive: The future is now.

Gone is the sci-fi pretense of an imagined future, and for good reason.

“All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing,” the 62-year-old godfather of cyberspace told Wired.com by phone. “That’s why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.”

Out Tuesday from publisher Putnam/Penguin, Zero History dissects our paranoid, post-9/11 information overload with an eye for imminent terror and immanent transcendence. Like Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Don DeLillo’s White Noise before it, Gibson’s new novel is not as interested in riveting plot points as it is in parsing an everyday life swarming with signifiers.

Its main characters — detail-obsessed Russian translator Milgrim, ex-rocker and taste-making detective Hollis Henry and postmodern marketing mogul Hubertus Bigend — have been retrieved from the pages of Gibson’s previous novels Pattern Recognition and Spook Country to serve as ciphers through which the author’s hypercritical cultural examinations are executed.

Wired.com spoke with Gibson in a wide-ranging interview about Zero History, social networking, 9/11, fashionable militarism, brainy endeavors like Inception and The Century of the Self, smartphones and the cinematic adaptation of his sci-fi classic Neuromancer.

Wired.com: Many of your previous characters have returned in Zero History, but it seems like the ones that steal the show are named Twitter and iPhone.

William Gibson: I hope not literally. It’s naturalism, in terms of the milieu I’m describing, which is a milieu I encounter more often not. The people I hang out with tend to use Macs, not that I think they’re necessarily superior. It’s just the brand they smoke. The next book I may have to depict a Windows cultural universe just for balance.

Wired.com: There’s a scene in the book where Milgrim is asked whether he’s running a Mac or a PC. And when he answered “Mac,” I could immediately hear the anti-Apple crusaders on Wired.com in my head screaming, “This is an outrage!”

Gibson: [Laughs] It’s what I encounter in researching that particular milieu. What people don’t notice is that Garreth’s laptop is another unnamed brand, which is probably some weird, rugged, military unit running stuff we couldn’t imagine. He’s not a vanilla Mac user. But I did give Milgrim and Sleight totally bland, extinct smartphones like the Neo.

Wired.com: How about Twitter? More than most authors I’ve checked out, your tweet-happy avatar @GreatDismal seems to be most comfortable messaging and coolhunting on the service. And in the novel, Twitter’s consistently used as a communication and parenting device, depending on the spook.

Gibson: Well, I discovered Twitter while I was writing the novel, and I immediately saw its odd potential for being a tiny, private darknet that no one else can access. I’m always interested in the spooky repurposing of everyday things. After a few days on Twitter, what was most evident to me is that, if you set it up right, it’s probably the most powerful novelty aggregator that has ever existed. Magazines have always been novelty aggregators, and people who work for them find and assemble new and interesting stuff, and people like me buy them. Or used to buy them, when magazines were the most efficient way to find novel things.

But now with Twitter, after following people who have proven themselves to be extremely adroit and active novelty aggregators, I get more random novelty every day that I can actually use. A lot of it just slides by, but a lot of it is stuff that I used to have to go through considerable trouble to find. And a lot of it is so beyond the stuff I used to be able to find, which is good.

Wired.com: It sounds like Twitter has successfully brought the social networker out of you.

Gibson: I guess Twitter is the first thing that has been attractive to me as social media. I never felt the least draw to Facebook or MySpace. I’ve been involved anonymously in some tiny listservs, mainly in my ceaseless quest for random novelty, and sometimes while doing something that more closely resembles research.

But I never wanted to be on Facebook. And to my surprise, I found that Twitter started to bring in new friends and connections. I suspect the difference is that it is less formatted, or not formatted at all. It hasn’t been constructed to provide me an experience in any particular way, which is a function of its minimalist architecture.

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Authors: Scott Thill

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