By Frank Moher

What will Vancouver author William Gibson, the man perhaps most responsible for our notions of how the next century will look and behave, be doing in a few days as year zero clicks into place?

"Hopefully not sitting in some TV studio in my adopted homeland talking about it," says the 51-year-old ex-South Carolinian whose novels have turned science fiction on its geeky head and made the pens fall out of its pocket protector. "It seems every week I've had a call from some CBC producer wanting me to come in on New Year's Eve and talk about what Y2K is going to do to us. 'Don't worry about it, we'll be fine,' I tell them. 'Oh good,' they say."

But if there's an excess of digital angst in the air lately, much of it can be traced back to the basement room in which Gibson works. This, after all, is the man who, in his 1981 story Burning Chrome, coined the term "cyberspace," thus fixing in the popular imagination an unmapped territory accessible only via the benevolent, or perhaps not so benevolent, mediation of machines. 1984's Neuromancer forged cyberpunk, an aesthetic composed of equal parts youth and high-tech gleam, so vigorous it took Keanu Reeves fully two movies (Johnny Mnemonic, based on another of Gibson's short stories, and, more recently, The Matrix) to get it out of his system.

Gibson adds to his own little Sim-World - and, almost by default now, to our collective apocalyptic nightmares - in his latest novel, All Tomorrow's Parties (Penguin, 277 pages, $34.99). The third in what he likes to call a "triptych" (most people would say trilogy, but that. s too suggestive of SF schlock for its author. s comfort),All Tomorrow. s Parties takes a number of threads started in 1993. s Virtual Light and 1996. s Idoru, introduces a few new ones (including a vaporous megabillionaire who wants to turn an upcoming cataclysm to his advantage), and entwines them like so many fibre optic cables.

Reviewers have been mostly kind. "Those new to Gibson's, or cyberpunk, writing are ... assured a remarkable entry into the genre," wrote Lynn Crosbie here in the Post. "It completes his development from science-fiction hotshot to wry sociologist of the near future," noted Steven Poole in The Guardian, adding that, "in terms of concrete influence, William Gibson is probably the most important novelist of the past two decades."

Gibson insists that what he writes isn't really sci-fi. "In some weird way," he says, folding his lanky, six-foot-plus frame into a restaurant chair (when he sits, he looks like a half-closed piece of lawn furniture), "what I think I. ve been able to do with these last few books is build this mechanism that gears down the cognitive dissonance of contemporary reality into a form that makes it digestible. By telling people it's the future, they. re able to accept a fraction of the weirdness of the present."

He doesn't actually spend a lot of time thinking about the shape of things to come, he adds. "I don't imagine where my children will be living in 50 years. I don't at all assume that they'll be living in one of these late 90s William Gibson scenarios. That would be the weirdest fate of all."

I DON'T IMAGINE WHERE MY CHILDREN WILL BE LIVING IN 50 YEARS.

Gibson arrived in Vancouver in the 1ate 60s, after first dodging the draft for two years in Toronto. He eventually enroled at the University of British Co-lumbia and began writing fiction, influenced as much by William Burroughs as J.G. Ballard. He was also a fan of the American science fiction writer Alfred Bester: "What I still read Bester for is the purest sense that I know of anywhere of how much fun it was to live in Manhattan in the early . 50s, because that's really what his interplanetary scenario is, it's Manhattan nightlife."

Neuromancer, he says, was based on the criminal underworld of Victorian England. "It's a sort of world of guilds and apprentices. I think it must have seemed quite convincingly futuristic at one time, and for some people it evidently still does." (The novel still sells close to 3,000 copies a month.) "But it's something that's been temporally repositioned. No narrative is ever stranger than the real thing."

That's largely why his next novel will be his first in a contemporary setting.

Gibson has been moonwalking his way backwards through the 21st century for much of his career; Neuromancer was set some 50 years into the future, but the San Francisco of All Tomorrow. s Parties is just an earthquake or two away. A final backflip into the present seems almost inevitable.

But he also knows it's the only way, paradoxically, to move forward. "I have 20 years of technique invested in sort of pull-back shots where something emerges into the frame that tells the reader, 'Wow, it's the future' ... but I think it's one of those cases of technique being the enemy of art. I have to some-how break the frame now and come up with something different.

"What I suspect will happen - what I sort of hope will happen - is that if I pursue what it is in the world that excites me into the the year 2000, I'll find so much of it that people won't even realize that they're not reading a science fiction novel ... What I think that I'm doing is trying to find a way to really go for it and embrace the total weirdness of the 21st century."

Before he does that, though, he has a new X-Files script to complete. (His contribution to last season, Kill Switch, already has cult status among series. aficionados.) The new episode, he says, is about "testosterone and computer games and how women might adapt to too much of that in the workplace."

That would be in keeping with Gibson's generally courtly manner - watching out for the fairer sex. To a degree that would befuddle some of his fans, he is as traditional as he is visionary. (At one point, I propose that we chuck the conventional interview format and go Web surfing together; no, he gently tells me, that's not really his style.)

In that, he's not unlike another of our entrail-readers, Marshall McLuhan, who saw into the future, or at least a possible future, and scurried back to the comfort of the old ways. As we part, we discuss the fact that many industries and corporations will be shutting down on New Year's Eve, just in case. The world will slow for a moment. "You might even be able to hear it," Gibson says, and it seems to me I hear a note of longing in his voice.

William Gibson reads from All Tomorrow. s Parties at the OISE auditorium, 252 Bloor St. W., Toronto, Monday at 7:30 p.m. Entry free.