I have seen the future of literary criticism - and, as John Reed said - 'it works'. Works better, in fact, than Reed's beloved Soviet Union ever worked. And it will work, I believe, for other humanities disciplines. Science I'm not so sure about. But perhaps there too.

The purported inventor of the terms 'cyberspace' and 'matrix' is currently in the UK promoting his latest book, Spook Country. William Gibson's fans are screaming blue murder that the UK reviewing establishment has been slow and disrespectful in its attention to this latest masterpiece.

Gibson himself is 'cool' (a big-deal word for him) about the reception of Spook Country and has come up with another lexeme for critical neglect: 'antibuzz', or 'definition by absence'. He really should trademark these words. He'd be up there with the five "Boardroom Bonanza" fat cats featured on the front page of Wednesday's Guardian.

There's been no antibuzz, it should be said, in the neighbouring hard pages of this newspaper. Those interested in synopsis and critical verdict on Spook Country can find it in Steven Poole's review on August 18 - ("better late than never", say the fans) and John Crace's Digested Read the previous Tuesday - an act of desecration which has the Gibsonophile community foaming with rage, but no-one can hear you foam in cyberspace.

What's relevant to the grand proposition with which I began this piece is how Gibson nowadays writes, and how he demands to be read:

"One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition [Gibson's previous novel] is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text ... there's this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now."

What the author is outlining here is the theory of a new and innovatively creative reading practice. The first line in Spook Country is:

"'Rausch,' said the voice in Hollis Henry's cell. 'Node', it said."

Node is a Wired-like magazine that doesn't and probably never will exist. Rausch is the (non-) editor. Hollis is in Los Angeles, doing a feature on locative art - holograms of the famous dead, which can be attached, like ectoplasm, to places (eg River Phoenix outside the Viper Room).

Hollis is sleeping (as the next sentence informs us) in the Mondrian. It's a hotel on Sunset Boulevard - along from the Standard and the Chateau Marmont: five-star joints which feature centrally in the first chapters. Gibson's current fiction is product- and allusion-heavy. And the plot of Spook Country (which revolves around the concept of GPS triangulation) is fiendishly indirect. Help is appreciated.

Node-man, a Gibson fan, has duly set up a website with the devotional URL node.tumblr.com. Node-man also got a very early copy of Spook Country. The fan is unidentified: Gibson knows who he is, and says he lives in small-town USA and wants, apparently, to stay anonymous.

Node-man mobilised a volunteer army of fellow enthusiasts and set out to create what Gibson above terms the "Google aura", or what he prefers to call the critical "cloud" that hovers over every work of literature. We can now "map" this in ways we never could before - thanks to Messrs Google and Wikipedia.

What this means, at the basic level, is a new kind of annotation. Read that first sentence again, and hit the following URL (the second chapter of Spook Country shifts to New York: there are three lines of geographically separated, but GPS- and Google Earth-locatable, narrative which finally converge in Vancouver, Gibson's current hometown): node.tumblr.com/page/23.

The website has created a version of the cloud. It can only be a version. As Gibson states in the novel, when we watch TV, flipping our remote, we are not 'viewing', we are 'channelling'. So too, when we read a novel, we create our channel through it. Which is why my Da Vinci Code is different from your Da Vinci Code and each of ours are different from the five million others. Dan Brown's novel should be seen as a gigantic piece of Emmental, with millions of wormholes threading through it.

If you asked me what are the two best-annotated texts available to scholar and student in canonical English Literature, I would say the Alistair Fowler edition of Paradise Lost and the Ann Thompson edition of Hamlet. Colleagues would probably come up with alternative contenders. But they would be the same kind of footnote / endnote enterprises. Old school.

What the unknown Node-maestro has done is poles apart, both from this, and from the usual website-based 'everybody pitch in' mess. He's channelled the raw material supplied by his volunteers into a sign-posted route through Spook Country. It opens the way, I believe, to a new kind of critical commentary on texts. One can see, easily enough, how it could be extended to Paradise Lost, or Hamlet.

It's a two-step thing. Clearly, you need the Googleised data. But then, it needs to be shaped. Not definitively shaped - no reading or interpretation is ever final - but formed into a critical route. One of many possible routes, but one which gets you to the destination.

I have seen the future of English Studies. It's a cloud. Or a big cheese. Take your pick.