In 2003, William Gibson, arguably the most influential science-fiction writer since Philip K. Dick, stopped writing about the future. He started to set his novels in the present. The present, apparently, was good enough.

“Pattern Recognition” (Berkley, 367 pages, $7.99) was hailed as a second wind for Mr. Gibson. The band Sonic Youth, longtime fans, wrote a song about it. But Mr. Gibson is still best known for “Neuromancer” (1984), the book that coined the term “cyberspace.”

Alert readers of that book knew that Mr. Gibson’s future felt like a wildly extrapolated version of the present. It seemed real, in part, because it borrowed and tweaked brand names from the present — Braun still made coffeemakers, but Mitsubishi had become a bank. Trends of the time, such as the rising mystique of Tokyo, or the proliferation of urban space, were given proper names — the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. Seemingly trivial cultural observations became talismanic, and the contemporary reader was made to feel that he, in 1984, was living in legendary times.

By the time Mr. Gibson wrote “Pattern Recognition,” certain elements of “Neuromancer” had become old hat — space travel, cybernetics — while the Internet had become more pervasive than even he had dreamed. At the same time, Mr. Gibson’s obsession with the nuances of consumer culture looked more justified than ever. His recent fiction operates on the conviction that the world of advertising is as subtle and paranoid as any crime syndicate or spy agency. Witness this description of the evolution of the Michelin Man:

Or was it the Michelin Man, in one of his earliest, most stomach-churningly creepy manifestations, not the inflated-maggot deshelled Ninja Turtle of the present day, but that weird, jaded, cigar-smoking elder creature suggesting a mummy with elephantiasis.

The reference, in its confidence, suggests a secret history — a catalogue of pop observations in which such manifestations are noted and duly recorded.

Mr. Gibson’s new novel, “Spook Country” (Putnam, 371 pages, $25.95), makes the connection between consumer culture and secret histories explicit. “Intelligence,” explains one character, “is advertising turned inside out.” Secrets drive agencies like the CIA, but secrets are also “the very root of cool.” Similarly, artists are equivalent to the military: “That’s something that tends to happen with new technology generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.”

The burden of Mr. Gibson’s new fiction is to make his two favorite worlds collide. Advertisers must interact with the CIA, convincingly. In a futuristic world, Mr. Gibson would have a free hand, but the known world of 2007 forces him into some awkward scenarios.

The heroine in “Spook Country,” for example, is a lead singer turned investigative reporter. Hollis Henry, formerly of an early-90s band called The Curfew, is sent to write about “locative art” in Los Angeles. Locative art means computer-generated art assigned to specific GPS coordinates, stored on a server, and visible only through specially built goggles that superimpose, for instance, the body of River Phoenix outside the real-life Viper Room.

This same GPS technology, somehow, is being used to track a shipping container that, Hollis learns, might contain a nuclear bomb. Meanwhile, in New York, a transplanted Cuban crime family is passing information, via iPod, to an ex CIA man. These, and several other plot lines, eventually converge in Vancouver, where the shipping container comes home and Mr. Gibson’s plot, unfortunately, comes to an unsatisfying conclusion.

But the point of Mr. Gibson’s novels has never been the plot. His books begin with an excitingly imagined world and before taking on the mold of a conventional thriller. The point is the imagined world, which in these two recent novels, happens to be our own.

What does Mr. Gibson teach us? Politically, “Spook Country” makes a case against torture, ubiquitous surveillance, and data-mining. His first great hero was a hacker, and Mr. Gibson continues to champion the intuitive loner against the totalizing data-cruncher. In a memorable analogy, he compares traditional human intelligence to “breakbulk,” the oddball freight that stands out among ziggurats of shipping containers.

But the real news, in “Spook Country,” is that much of the flair that Mr. Gibson once brought to descriptions of cyberspace seems to fit perfectly, now, on all kinds of things. Hollis sees, in some video art “a beautifully lumpy porridge of imagery.” One character refers to the advertising man’s “really interestingly textured bull—-.” The ad-man himself, apologizing for having to mince his words, explains: “It’s as expensively quasi-factual as I can afford to be. Material like this tends to squirm a bit, as you can well imagine.” And the ex-CIA man senses, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, “a snag in the fabric of things, bureaucratically.”

This doesn’t teach us much, though it feels revelatory. My favorite moment comes in the Prada flagship: The clothes “spoke too much of money, to the street; they were clothes that Canal copied; anonymous in their way, but too easily described,” writes Mr. Gibson. This leads us to notice the way Mr. Gibson romances the difficult-to-describe. Here he describes a rifle: “Its wooden stock, in deliriously grained tropical hardwood, was biomorphic, counterintuitive somehow, like a Max Ernst landscape.” We get the picture, insofar as the picture needn’t be a definite image. Mr. Gibson’s hallmark — perhaps what led him to imagine cyberspace in the first place — is the envisioning of the unvisualisable, and the vertiginous, thrilling sensation the reader’s imagination feels as it fails.

blytal@nysun.com