n the latest issue of Dazed & Confused you'll find my review of William Gibson's ninth novel Spook Country, but if you can't get enough of the man, here is an unedited version of our brief email interview, in which he turned out to be a lot less critical of modern capitalism than some of his readers might have guessed.

In conventional thrillers, it's likely to be a spymaster or a  gangster who uses their vast resources to send the hero on a mission.  So why choose an advertising executive instead?
Having an ad executive as a spymaster keeps me just that much out of genre, I suppose. I like the spaces in between genre. In between genre and non-genre, really. If I used real spymasters or gangster, they'd probably aspire to be ad executives anyway. Ad executives are scarier, in the long run. They stand a much better chance of knowing what's really going on. Spymasters haven't seemed like the ones who've had the real infoormation, not for quite a while now. The CIA believed that East Germany, for instance, was in basically good shape, but it turned out the East Germans had been cooking their books. More recent examples are booth too familiar and too depressing.

Have you found, with your recent novels with more contemporary settings, that you were ever outpaced by current events when you were  writing them?
I think of them as speculative fictions of the recent past. Imagining the unthinkably strange world that was, say, last February. With Spook Country, I began the book with no knowledge of the NSA's domestic wiretapping program, and as that emerged further into the light it became important, with regard to certain plot-points, that my characters never know about that.  One of them does seem to have an inkling, if you read between the lines.

Both 2003's Pattern Recognition and Spook Country show how fast avant-garde art is commodified. Do you think there's anything left for  us that the global free market can't absorb?
I'm not sure there's still an avant-garde, now, in that sense. I think avant-garde was an artifact of industrial culture. Now we're post-industrial, or post-post, and there are no more backwaters where avant-garde ideas, in the old sense, can find time to ripen. What little genuine novelty there is too valuable to remain unharvested. A magazine like [Dazed & Confused] is a novelty-aggregator.

Is capitalism really inescapable?
Was it Shaw who said that the problem is when there's were too few capitalists, rather than too many? My favorite societies have large and thriving middle classes, as opposed to societies with lots of desperately poor people and quite a few extremely rich people, and less in between. Holland as opposed to, say, Mexico.

How do you feel about the view that modern human experience is so shaped and mediated by culture and commerce and electronic connectivity that we almost don't know what's real any more?
I don't think we're really any further from certainty of what's real than we were in, say, the 10th Century. The most dangerous 21st-century humans, it seems to me, are exactly the ones with the narrowest certainty of what's real.

What did you think of Sonic Youth's song based on your last novel?
I was pleasantly surprised that they'd do that. I met them when they toured those songs, in Vancouver, and found them very amiable.

Spook Country is out now, published by Viking.