William Gibson’s 2014 novel presents a world where time travel exists, but only digital information can be exchanged. Someone from our near future witnesses a murder from a world years in a future she won’t see, a fact which pulls several characters from the periphery into the roiling center of world-changing events. And performance art.

Sometimes she knew with solid certainty that she had four children, and five more stillbirths: nine times giving birth in floods of blood and pain, and of those, four surviving. At other times she knew equally well that she had two children, both born by caesarian section late in her life after she had given […]