William Gibson, the godfather of cyberpunk, knows virtual reality. His books have influenced writers and technologists alike in the age of the Internet. But his novel Spook Country turns the idea of how people create their own worlds on its head, as science creates its own ghostly world of digital phantoms superimposed on our own. Making personal and new communal realities is not just about technology, he argues. “I knew a man who was a global financier of some note, and his strategy was to make everyone operate on his time,” said Gibson. “He’d go to various cities on Larry Time, and all these bankers had to stay on his day. He became his own time zone.”