he Microsoft Corporation creeps down the telephone line to update my computer software every now and then. What seem like innocuous greetings from Microsoft are often security patches, designed to close gaps in the software through which prying eyes out there in the vast, cold reaches of cyberspace could potentially glimpse my data and my innermost thoughts.

The habit we have of describing the circuits and fiber optics that move data from one place to another as a landscape is owed mainly to William Ford Gibson, a 6-foot-5 beanpole of a writer with round glasses, who coined the word cyberspace and popularized it in his 1984 science fiction novel "Neuromancer." The book has been translated into about 20 languages — including Hungarian and Estonian — and is a cult favorite around the world. It was the first of several books in which Mr. Gibson envisioned an information-obsessed, information-saturated future where stealing and protecting data are the main preoccupations and access to information separates the haves from the have-nots.

Mr. Gibson's novels and short stories are worshiped by hackers, argued over by philosophers in arcane journals and rhapsodized about by teenage garage bands. But he has paid a literary price for presaging the vexations of the information future in such vivid terms, while dreaming up the talismanic word cyberspace — which he clearly regrets, given the way he sometimes bristles when asked about it. The "father of cyberspace" tag has kept him confined to the science fiction shelf (in the back of the bookstore), where teenagers tend to gather and which mature readers of fiction tend to avoid.

Influential science fiction writers typically die broke and unknown to the broader reading public — unless a blockbuster movie brings them somehow front and center. Mr. Gibson's recent few novels — "Idoru," "Virtual Light" and his most successful achievement so far, "Pattern Recognition" — have escaped the sci-fi ghetto and jumped to the front of the bookstore with little if any help from the Hollywood dream machine.

The 20-year-olds who helped to make "Neuromancer" the bible of the cyberpunk movement are nearing middle age — and coming into the prime book-buying demographic. But Mr. Gibson's recent appearance in the bookstore window has mainly to do with the fact that the world we actually live in has finally caught up to the world he depicted in his novels when the information age was not yet even a gleam in Wall Street's eye.

Teenage boys were naturally turned on by Mr. Gibson's gimmickry — like the computer jacks that hackers plug into their brains to enter cyberspace. But subtract the technology, and you see that the early Gibson books were founded on the idea that the information age would be qualitatively different from the ones that preceded it and that the data-driven society was going to be anything but benign.

These early books depict a world in which multinational corporations have eclipsed national governments as the most influential entities on a globe that has been carved up into franchises. The Gibsonian Internet is depicted as a morally compromised back street, where corporate security departments battle hackers-for-hire who earn a living pilfering data — sometimes motivated by good, but just as often by greed.

Mr. Gibson understood very early that the Internet would bring out the worst in many people by allowing them to perform morally suspect acts in anonymity. He was on the mark when he suggested that the obsession with collecting data about human conduct would quickly turn sinister. Identity theft and medical redlining are examples. He foresaw the tyranny of market testing, which homogenizes everything from movies to food, opting every time for the lowest common denominator.

"Pattern Recognition" is a genuinely eerie novel that examines how the hyperinformational present affects creativity and the human soul. It features a Gibsonian marketing consultant — or "coolhunter" — whose job is to search the increasingly sterile globe for the next hot product, which then becomes grist for the homogenization machine. The coolhunter, Cayce Pollard, is hypersensitive to the slightest variations in what people like and wear and can identify nascent trends simply by walking among crowds of people in a street. This special ability exacts a heavy price, however, for Cayce is profoundly allergic to the derivative. Corporatized logos and brands (Tommy Hilfiger, Prada, Louis Vuitton) make her feel almost as though she has been poisoned.

Cayce is a stand-in for everyone in the hyperinformational present, where every wall, suitcase and shopping cart is plastered with ads and where marketers refer to spaces that are not yet advertised upon as dead. The contradiction of Cayce's life is clear: the more she hunts down the increasingly rare "cool" things, the more she facilitates the process by which the original and artistic are diluted and the world becomes ever more cluttered with derivative forms that pollute the perceptual field.

The danger of this age, Cayce realizes, is that every city will eventually look like every other one and that all of human experience could one day be converted by the marketing machine into a few variations on a single theme. The problem for the coolhunter, and for the rest of us, is that the negative aspects of an age that was sold to us as problem-free were right on top of us — and pressing in on our lives — before we recognized that they even existed.