In a move that likely wouldn't have happened without William Gibson's revolutionary Neuromancer, the author will appear as his digital self on Second Life to read from his new novel Spook Country.

Penguin will be holding a whole host of Second Life events to promote the book, including a contest to design Gibson's online avatar.

Gibson invented the word "cyberspace" in his Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel "Neuromancer", now almost 25 years later we see our world mirroring the one he created. As author Jack Womack put it

"What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"