Sci-fine by Me

I've been longing lately for a new William Gibson novel; Pattern Recognition is almost three years old already. Hunting for any news of such a novel online, I happily happened upon (again) the author's blog, on which he has published several new passages from a work in progress and a link to an excellent essay, "time machine cuba," on how he "learned of science fiction and history in a single season." Apart from a shiver of familiarity with how he discovered The Past in a trunk (I discovered the same Past in Time-Life books at the Carnegie Library in Ironwood, Michigan), the essay contains every aspect of Gibson's writing that I like: the blurred boundary between technical and literary language, the way he seems to back up into his narrative rather than charge at it headlong, the fascination with individual artifacts of the past, and above all the sureness of the prose. I've always had the sense, reading his work, that I'm communing with an expert. More than anything else, this expertise comes from his ability to show how science fiction is always about the collapse of civilization - sometimes into a dystopia, sometimes a utopia. Can't wait for the new novel - Cuba? santeria? intelligence services?