Zero History  By William Gibson  Despite its obvious
satisfactions, there are risks attached to being proved right.
In the case of William Gibson, the triumph and eventual collapse
of a financial system based on pure illusion, and the emergence
and swift dominance of the "consensual hallucination" he named
"cyberspace", have reduced him from a prophet to a pundit and
transformed his approach from a sensitive taking of the pulse to
a matter of simply looking around. Gibson's latest trilogy of
novels - Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and now Zero History
- takes place in the future - our present - which he predicted
in his earlier trilogies, "Sprawl" (Neuromancer, Count Zero,
Mona Lisa Overdrive) and "Bridge" (Virtual Light, Idoru, All
Tomorrow's Parties). Being able to say "I told you so" comes at
the cost, in the more recent books, of the fantastical becoming
mundane, the other-worldly becoming everyday.  But while
Gibson's earlier successes impose an air of obsolescence on Zero
History, there is still ple