It's nearly 30 years since the word "cyberspace" first appeared in print, in a short story by William Gibson for the July 1982 edition of the now-defunct science fiction magazine Omni. In an interview in this summer's Paris Review, Gibson describes, not for the first time, how he came up with the word: "The first thing I did was to sit down with a yellow pad and a Sharpie and start scribbling - infospace, dataspace. I think I got cyberspace on the third try, and I thought, oh, that's a really weird word. I liked the way it felt in the mouth - I thought it sounded like it meant something while still being essentially hollow." The trajectory from Omni to the Paris Review says less about the way Gibson has changed in the intervening years than about the way science fiction has, both in itself and in terms of its status in the wider culture - in large part thanks to Gibson's nine novels. The last six of them - (1993),

, Cayce has been brought to London to give her opinion on a new logo for the world's second best-selling brand of running shoes. She has an unusual gift: she is, for want of a better word, allergic to branding; the stronger the brand, the worse her reaction - the first time she saw the Michelin Man, as a child, she was nearly sick. This makes her invaluable as a marketing consultant. After she gives the new trainer logo the thumbs down, Bigend makes her another, less conventional proposition. Cayce is a fan of "the footage", an abstract film that's being uploaded to the internet in short segments, which appear unannounced and at unpredictable intervals in various quiet corners of the web, "somewhere where it's possible to upload a video file and simply leave it there". (The novel, set in the late summer of 2002, was published in February 2003, more than two years before the first video was uploaded to YouTube.) Bigend wants Cayce to track down the maker of the footage. Cayce agrees, not least because she'd like to know who's behind it herself, and sees that with Bigend's resources she may be able to find out. It's also, in Cayce's head at least, complicatedly bound up with the disappearance of her father, a retired spook last seen heading towards downtown Manhattan on 11 September 2001 (the Los Angeles Times recently called