WILLIAM Gibson - a Luddite? Well, he's giving out, in his soft Southern drawl, about the surge in the number of mobile phone users on the streets of London since he was there two years ago.
"The time you're talking on the street on the phone you're not on the street," he says - it's as if all these mediated experiences are making us miss the real environments around us.
In real life, Gibson is the opposite of hi tech. He maintains a high degree of aloofness from the technologies he writes about in such obsessive detail almost as if just using them would increase the risk of being somehow "infected" by them.
He wrote his most famous novel, Neuwmacer, on a 1927 olive green Hermes portable typewriter, and only recently migrated to a battered old Apple Macintosh. While he has finally begun to dabble on the World Wide Web, he steers clear of having a post box in cyberspace - an email address.
Yet after Bill Gates, William Gibson is one of the most talked about authors in cyberspace. And he ought to be: he "invented" it.
The Vancouver based author coined the visual metaphor 12 years ago, to describe the space within and between computers. Not just their circuits and chips and cables, but as a realm of experience where so much "happens" nowadays. It's almost as if, once he'd given us the word for the thing, it summoned the actual thing into being.
Cyberspace is where the banks keep your money. Or where the stock market actually takes place. Or where you "are" during a long distance phone call. Or when you play online Doom. Cyberspace is where everything happens on the networks which cocoon our planet.
And because Gibson coined the term, this tall, gangling, unassuming 48 year old is treated like some boffin or guru. He's quick to stress, though, that he didn't invent these networks. Unlike his friend and fellow sci fi author Bruce Sterling, he says, he's far from a technical expert on anything.
"Bruce is genuinely scientifically literate - he would be able to read and understand all the articles in a given issue of New Scientist. But I just skim them for nice buzzwords."
BORN in South Carolina in 1948, he grew up in Virginia. When he was 20 he went on low budget "Grand Tour" of Europe with his girlfriend and future wife, ending up in Canada to ensure he wasn't drafted into the Vietnam War.
Today he's based in Vancouver, occasionally bumping into fellow author Douglas Coupland, and very occasionally delving into travel writing (in an unforgettable article for W&red magazine he once described Singapore as "Disneyland with the death penalty").
In interviews and readings, he says the question he's most frequently asked is: "What will the future be like? Then I have to explain that that's not what I'm into.
Gibson is neither a futurologist nor a science fiction writer of the Shiny Spaceship brigade. His novels take existing trends, and pushes them to the limit, from computer interfaces to converging media conglomerations. And no spaceships.
He recalls how 1960s science fiction "was always American, there wasn't any old stuff there was no past, no history, no textures".
The world he constructs is far more dirty and disordered. "If you want to see how something works, you look at where it's broken, you can see right inside it when the bits start falling off. J. G. Ballard had the right idea back in the 60s he said Earth is the alien planet. And we're not exactly going to be going anywhere in the foreseeable future. Science fiction has a valuable role in exploring the increasingly bizarre, incomprehensible world we are creating for ourselves, which is fundamentally out of control."
His latest novel, Idoru, focuses on the themes of media and fame. It's set in post earthquake, post millennium Tokyo. Gibson, forever the virtual tourist, lingers longingly on its strange new objects and inventions.
Some of the technology is still a long way off (earclip translators, or buildings which build themselves). Yet many of the other devices, such as the semi intelligent fridge which bawls "Hey you've left me open" are just about here already. Surprisingly, though, much of the material is real. Many of the topsy turvy cultural artifacts and devices in this fictional Tokyo are here already.
The Idoru (idol) of the book's title is a beautiful, mysterious media star, who happens to be an entirely virtual construct. A bit of software. But an enigmatic guitar hero called Rez who is half Chinese and half Irish ("I wanted to give him a background that was so unlikely") wants to marry her.
A member of Kez's teenage fanclub flies to Tokyo to uncover the truth, and her quest is intertwined with that of a disgraced "data miner" called Laney, who used to work for an extremely tabloid TV show. His forte is to swim through the electronic "signatures" which people inadvertently leave in their wake, from credit card transactions to phone calls and security alarm passwords, in order to build up a picture of their secret lives and scandals.
"The economy of celebrity is a very big and real thing in the world today," Gibson says. "This is a book about the workings of celebrity in a hypermediated society, a society not too different from our own." It takes existing trends (fandom, stalkers and tabloid journalism) and pushes them to their extremes. Yet he continues to have a certain faith in the uncontrollable nature of the Internet today.
"The difference between TV as I grew up with it and the Internet and the Web today is that broadcast television has been hierarchical, a top down pyramid, from the boardroom of the BBC and CBS down. The Internet is totally different. Any kid with enough talent and the right tools can build a far better Web site than the corporate ones because they understand the medium better. We need more randomness, it's increasingly hard to come by. That's one of the great things about Dublin - you can still wander around its streets, quite randomly.
And off he wanders. Famous in cyberspace, but hardly registering a second glance in the Friday lunchtime rush around us...