This is the world as we know it - it’s not heaven, but it isn’t exactly hell. Rather than fiery warnings, Gibson delivers detachment. It’s this mild sense of displacement rather than apocalyptic furor that defines his moody story of a young man separated from his body, relegated to the position of eternal observer in a culture changing in the aftermath of Sept.

A place whose time-mirages, if you could see them, might mostly be quite pleasant.”

These writers include Douglas Coupland, Yann Martel and, of course, Gibson, who in “Dougal Disincarnate” defines the science fiction in which his characters immerse as “ mirror. Luckily, most of the 23 authors here, all Canadian, forgo this brand of shrill alarmism to give us stories that cast sometimes cynical, sometimes melancholy and very often humorous looks at a social landscape not all that different from our own. Given Gartner’s tone of 1990s-style millennial anxiety - her concerns include “enetic engineering, cosmetic pharmacology, avatar sex, Google-brains, melting ice caps, and everything virtual, nothing private” - it might take a moment to remember that what she’s talking about has already come to pass. It’s been a while, after all, since Y2K turned out to be a bust, and even longer since William Gibson invented cyberspace.

Reading Zsuzsi Gartner’s introduction to “Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales From Tomorrow,” you might get the idea that the future’s gotten old.

Vidalia in Paris by Sasha Watson