Some science fiction stories, like Dune, take place tens of thousands of years in the future. Some science fiction stories takes place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away. And some take place in a nebulous and inevitable place called the “near future.” But how close to the present can science fiction get, and still be science fiction. In The Big Book of Science Fiction, editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer defined science fiction as a story that “depicts the future, whether in a. stylistic or realistic manner.” But how close can that future get? The dear departed and science fiction series Max Headroom took place “fifteen minutes” into the future.

A better edge-case might be the Blue Ant Trilogy by William Gibson. Gibson is such a science fiction-y author he is often referenced as a founder of the science fiction sub-genre of cyberpunk. But the Blue Ant Trilogy is not cyberpunk. It may not even be science fiction. Consisting of the novels Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History, the Blue Ant Trilogy is…something else. It could be a techno-thriller, speculative brand fiction, an evocation of nostalgia for the present, or a hauntological excavation of the early internet. Here’s more from Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska essay Space Over Time: The Urban Space in William Gibson’s Techno-thriller Novels:

In his attempt to capture the spirit of the early 21st century, a period of growing connectivity, Gibson essentially focuses on the urban realities of the networked societies he “fantasized” about in his earlier, science fiction novels. The big, “global” cities featured in the Blue Ant trilogy, such as New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Moscow, or Vancouver, have their apparent, real life counterparts, yet the thoroughly mediatized nature of the cityscapes fashioned by Gibson makes it difficult to establish a clear-cut boundary between the real and the imagined, the strange and the familiar, the authentic and the manufactured.

While the semiotic excess in the fictionalized cities is usually structured and interpreted mainly using capitalism as a point of reference, Gibson’s literary representation of all things urban tends to rely on juxtaposing the quasi-psychogeographic experiences and reflections of his fictitious protagonists with spatial navigation tools, such as GPS, Google Earth, Google Maps, Wikipedia, social networking media, etc. However, even those instantly trackable and seemingly explicit settings retain their enigmatic instability, very much in accordance with the events taking place in them.

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