For years I have thought that William Gibson is our most insightful fiction writer on material things and what it is like to live with them, but also, and not paradoxically, on immaterial things and what it is like to live with them. The same writer who gave us “cyberspace” (the term, and also the first visions of what it could be like, in the 1984 Neuromancer) also gave us a Japanese reproduction of an American bomber jacket so lovingly described that readers got emotional when an antagonist made a hole in it with a lit cigarette (in 2003’s Pattern Recognition).