From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William Gibson
William Gibson in August 2007
Born	March 17, 1948 (1948-03-17) (age 59) Conway, South Carolina
Occupation	Novelist
Writing period	1977—
Genres	Science fiction
Literary movement	Cyberpunk
Debut works	"Fragments of a Hologram Rose" (short story, 1977) Neuromancer (novel, 1984)
Influences	Bester,[1] Borges,[2] Burroughs,[3] Cornell,[4] Cronenberg,[5] Delany,[1] Disch,[6] Farber,[7] Hammett,[8] Hawks,[9] Le Guin,[10] Ishii,[11] Pynchon,[2] Reed,[8] Russ,[10] Stone[8]
Influenced	Doctorow,[12] Morgan,[13] Nagata, Stephenson, Stross[14]
Website	http://WilliamGibsonbooks.com

William Ford Gibson, born March 17, 1948 (1948-03-17) (age 59), in Conway, South Carolina is an American-Canadian^[15] writer who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction.^[16] Gibson coined the term cyberspace in 1982, and popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In depicting a visualised worldwide communications network before the ubiquity of the Internet, Gibson is credited with anticipating important aspects, and establishing the conceptual foundations, of the Internet and the Web in particular.

Having moved around frequently with his family as a child, Gibson grew to be a shy, ungainly teenager and, rejecting religion, he took refuge in reading science fiction. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding school in Arizona, Gibson dodged the draft at the onset of the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada, where he became immersed in counterculture and after a few years became a full-time author. Gibson's early writings are generally futuristic stories about the effect of cybernetics and cyberspace on humans; lowlife meets high tech. In the 1980s, Gibson's short stories developed a noir, bleak feel and after attracting publication in science fiction magazines, effectively renovated the science fiction genre itself, at the time considered widely insignificant. The themes, settings and characters developed in these stories ultimately culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered unprecedented critical and considerable commercial success, virtually launching the cyberpunk literary movement.

Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained rooted in Neuromancer, his work has continued to evolve conceptually and stylistically. After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson became central to an entirely new science fiction sub-genre – steampunk – with the publication in 1990 of the alternate history novel The Difference Engine, written in collaboration with Bruce Sterling. In the 1990s he composed the Bridge trilogy of novels, which focused on sociological observations of near future urban environments and late stage capitalism. His most recent novels — Pattern Recognition (2003), and Spook Country (2007) — are both set in a contemporary universe and have put Gibson's work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.

In terms of recognition, The Literary Encyclopedia identifies Gibson as "one of North America's most highly acclaimed science fiction writers." To date, Gibson has written a number of short stories, nine critically acclaimed novels (one in collaboration), a nonfiction artist's book, has contributed articles to several major publications, and collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers and musicians. Feted by The Guardian in 1999 as "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades," his thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors, in academia, cyberculture, and technology. Although he retains dual citizenship,^[17] William Gibson has lived in Vancouver, Canada since leaving America in the 1960s.^[4]

William S. Burroughs at his 70th birthday party in 1983. Burroughs, more than any other beat generation writer, was an important influence on the adolescent Gibson.

William Ford Gibson was born in 1948 in the coastal city of Conway, South Carolina and spent most of his childhood in Wytheville, Virginia, a small mining town in the Appalachians where his parents were born and raised.^[18][19] His family moved around frequently during Gibson's youth due to his father's position as manager in a large construction company.^[20] While Gibson was still in his early childhood,^[VI] his father choked to death in a restaurant while on a business trip.^[18] His mother, unable to tell William the bad news, had someone else inform him of the death.^[21]

Loss is not without its curious advantages for the artist. Major traumatic breaks are pretty common in the biographies of artists I respect.

—William Gibson, interview with The New York Times Magazine, August 19, 2007.^[21]

In a matter of days after the death, Gibson's mother returned them from where they had been living in Norfolk, Virginia to Wytheville.^[19][22] Gibson later described Wytheville as "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted" and credits the beginnings of his relationship with science fiction, his "native literary culture",^[22] with the subsequent feeling of abrupt exile.^[18] At thirteen, unbeknownst to his mother he purchased an anthology of Beat writing, thereby gaining exposure to the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs; Burroughs had a particularly pronounced effect, greatly altering Gibson's notions of the possibilities of science fiction literature.^[3][8]

A shy, ungainly teenager, Gibson, consciously rejecting religion,^[22] took refuge in reading science fiction and edgier, renegade writers such as Burroughs and Henry Miller.^[17] At fifteen, he was sent to a private boarding school in Tucson, Arizona by his then "chronically anxious and depressive" mother,^[18] who had remained in Wytheville since the death of her husband and who in turn died when Gibson was 19.^[22][19] Tom Maddox has commented that Gibson "grew up in an America as disturbing and surreal as anything J. G. Ballard ever dreamed."^[23]

Gibson in 2007 at a reading from Spook Country in British Columbia, Canada. Gibson fled to Canada in the late 1960s to avoid the Vietnam War draft, and has lived there ever since. Since "The Winter Market" (1985), a short story commissioned by Vancouver Magazine with the stipulation that it be set in his adopted home, Gibson had actively avoided using the city as a setting until Spook Country (2007).^[24]

After his mother's death, Gibson left school without graduating and became very isolated for a long time, traveling to California and Europe and immersing himself in counterculture.^[22][19][17] In 1967, he elected to move to Canada in order "to avoid the Vietnam war draft".^[18] At his draft hearing, he honestly informed interviewers that his intention in life was to sample every mind-altering substance in existence.^[25] Gibson has observed that he "did literally evade the draft, as they never bothered drafting me";^[18] after the hearing he went home and purchased a bus ticket to Toronto, and left a week or two later.^[22] In No Maps for These Territories (2000), a biographical documentary of the author, he asserted that his draft dodging was motivated less by conscientious objection than a desire to sleep with "hippie chicks" and indulge in hashish.^[22]

In Toronto he found the emigre community of American draft dodgers unbearable due to the prevalence of clinical depression, suicide and hardcore substance abuse.^[22] He appeared, during the Summer of Love of 1967, in a CBC newsreel item about hippie subculture in Yorkville, Toronto,^[26][27] for which he was paid $500 - the equivalent of 20 weeks rent - which financed his later travels.^[28] Aside from a "brief, riot-torn spell" in the District of Columbia, Gibson spent the rest of the 1960s in Toronto, where he met a Vancouver girl with whom he subsequently traveled to Europe.^[18] Gibson has recounted that they concentrated their travels on European nations with fascist regimes and favourable exchange rates, including spending time on a Greek archipelago and in Istanbul in 1970,^[29] as they "couldn't afford to stay anywhere that had anything remotely like hard currency".^[30]

The couple married and settled in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1972, with Gibson looking after their first child while they lived off his wife's teaching salary. During the 1970s Gibson made a substantial part of his living from scouring Salvation Army thrift stores for underpriced artefacts he would then up-market to specialist dealers.^[29] Realizing that it was easier to sustain high college grades, and thus qualify for generous financial aid than to work,^[8] he enrolled at the University of British Columbia, earning "a desultory bachelor's degree in English"^[18] in 1977.^[31] Through studying English literature, he was exposed to a wider range of fiction than he would have read otherwise; something he credits with giving him ideas inaccessible from within the culture of science fiction, including an awareness of postmodernity.^[10] It was at UBC that he attended his first course on science fiction, at the end of which he was encouraged to write his first short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose".^[20]

Punk rock band The Clash performing in 1980. The punk subculture had a significant influence on Gibson's early writing in the mid-to-late 1970s and on the nascent cyberpunk movement in general.

After considering pursuing a master's degree on the topic of hard science fiction novels as fascist literature,^[8] Gibson discontinued writing in the year that followed graduation and, as one critic put it, expanded his collection of punk records.^[32] During this period he worked at various jobs, including a three-year stint as teaching assistant on a film history course at his alma mater.^[20] Impatient at much of what he saw at a science fiction convention in Vancouver in 1980 or 1981, Gibson found in fellow panelist, punk musician and author John Shirley, a kindred spirit.^[33] The two became immediate and lifelong friends, and it was Shirley who persuaded him to sell his early short stories and to take writing seriously.^[32][33]

Through Shirley, Gibson came into contact with Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, who would later become pioneers of the cyberpunk movement; reading Gibson's work, they realised that it was, as Sterling put it, "breakthrough material" and that they needed to "put down our preconceptions and pick up on this guy from Vancouver; this [was] the way forward."^[34][22] Gibson met Sterling at a science fiction convention in Denver, Colorado in the Autumn of 1981, where he read "Burning Chrome" – the first cyberspace short story – to an audience of four people, and later stated that Sterling "completely got it."^[22]

In October 1982 Gibson traveled to Austin, Texas for ArmadilloCon, at which he appeared with Shirley, Sterling and Shiner on a panel called "Behind the Mirrorshades: A Look at Punk SF", where Shiner noted "the sense of a movement solidified."^[34] After a weekend discussing rock'n'roll, MTV, Japan, fashion, drugs and politics, Gibson left the cadre for Vancouver, declaring half-jokingly that "a new axis has been formed."^[34] Sterling, Shiner, Shirley and Gibson, along with Rudolf Rucker, went on to form the hard core of the radical cyberpunk literary movement.^[35]

Main article: Burning Chrome

A refrigerator abandoned in the French Quarter of New Orleans the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina appropriated as a graffitti artwork, illustrating Gibson's assertion in "Burning Chrome" (1981) that "…the street finds its own uses for things."

Gibson's early writings are generally futuristic stories about the influences of cybernetics and cyberspace (computer-simulated reality) technology on the human race. His themes of hi-tech shantytowns, recorded or broadcast stimulus (later to be developed into the "sim-stim" package featured so heavily in Neuromancer), and dystopic intermingling of technology and humanity, are already evident in his first published short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" (1977).^[8] The latter thematic obsession was described by his friend and fellow author, Bruce Sterling, in the introduction to Gibson's short story collection Burning Chrome, as "Gibson's classic one-two combination of lowlife and high tech."^[36]

In the 1980s, Gibson's short stories appeared in Omni and Universe II, wherein his fiction developed a film noir, bleak feel. In his early work, Gibson consciously distanced himself as far as possible from the mainstream of science fiction (towards which he felt "an aesthetic revulsion"), to the extent that his highest goal was to become "a minor cult figure, a sort of lesser Ballard."^[8] When Bruce Sterling started to distribute the stories, he found that "people were just genuinely baffled…I mean they could not literally parse the guy's paragraphs…the imaginative tropes he was inventing were just beyond peoples' grasp."^[22]

While Larry McCaffery has commented that these early short stories displayed flashes of Gibson's ability, fellow science fiction critic Darko Suvin has identified them as "undoubtedly [cyberpunk's] best works", constituting the "furthest horizon" of the genre.^[33] The themes which Gibson developed in the stories, the setting of "Burning Chrome" and the character of Molly Millions from "Johnny Mnemonic" ultimately culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer.^[33]

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

—opening line of Neuromancer (1984)

Neuromancer was commissioned by Terry Carr for the third series of Ace Science Fiction Specials, which was to feature exclusively debut novels. Given a year to complete the work,^[37] Gibson undertook the actual writing out of "blind animal terror" at the obligation to write an entire novel — a feat which he felt he was "four or five years away from."^[8] After witnessing the first twenty minutes of landmark cyberpunk film Blade Runner (1982) which was released when Gibson had written a third of the novel, he "figured [Neuromancer] was sunk, done for"; that readers would conclude that he had plagiarized the visual texture of the film.^[38] During the writing process, he re-wrote the first two-thirds of the book twelve times, had a fear of losing the reader's attention and was convinced that he would be "permanently shamed" following its publication; yet what resulted was a major imaginative leap forward for a first time novelist.^[8]

Skyscape of Chiba City, the primary setting of Neuromancer (1984). Image shot on 2006-11-24.

Its initial release was greeted without fanfare, but the novel hit a cultural nerve,^[39] quickly becoming an underground word-of-mouth hit.^[33] It became the first novel to win the "triple crown"^[8] of major science fiction awards: the Nebula, the Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award,^[40] and went on to sell more than 6.5 million copies worldwide.^[41]

Lawrence Person, writing in his "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto" (1998) identified the novel as "the archetypal cyberpunk work,"^[42] and in 2005, Time magazine included it in their list of 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, claiming that "[t]here is no way to overstate how radical [Neuromancer] was when it first appeared."^[43] According to critic Larry McCaffery, the auspiciousness of the novel was in its originality of vision, Gibson's exhilarating prose, technological similes and metaphors, and the concept of the matrix, where "data dance with human consciousness … human memory is literalized and mechanized … multi-national information systems mutate and breed into startling new structures whose beauty and complexity are unimaginable, mystical, and above all nonhuman."^[8] In reference to himself as an author circa Neuromancer, Gibson later commented that "I'd buy him a drink, but I don't know if I'd loan him any money," and referred to the novel as "an adolescent's book."^[22]

Main articles: Sprawl trilogy, The Difference Engine, and Bridge trilogy

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, a fictional squatted version of which constitutes the setting for Gibson's eponymous Bridge trilogy of novels.

Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained rooted in Neuromancer, his work continued to evolve conceptually and stylistically.^[40] Despite rewriting the conclusion of Neuromancer at the last minute in a deliberate attempt to prevent himself from ever writing a sequel, he did precisely that with Count Zero (1986), a slower-paced character-focused work set in The Sprawl setting alluded to in its predecessor.^[44] He next intended to write an unrelated postmodern space opera, entitled The Log of the Mustang Sally, but reneged on the contract with the publisher after falling out over the dustjacket art of their hardcover edition of Count Zero.^[45] Abandoning The Log of the Mustang Sally, Gibson instead wrote Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), a stylistically virtuousic novel which in the words of Larry McCaffery "turned off the lights" on cyberpunk literature.^[8][33] It was a culmination of his previous two novels, set in the same universe with shared characters, thereby completing the Sprawl trilogy. The trilogy, Gibson's first, solidified his reputation,^[46] with each of the three novels earning Nebula and Hugo award nominations for best novel.

The Sprawl trilogy was succeeded in 1990 by The Difference Engine, an alternate history novel Gibson wrote in collaboration with Bruce Sterling. Set in a technologically advanced Victorian era Britain, the novel was a departure from the authors' cyberpunk roots. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1991 and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1992, and is often cited as a central novel of the steampunk genre.^[47]

Gibson's second series, "the Bridge trilogy", is composed of Virtual Light (1993), a "darkly comic urban detective story",^[48] Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999). It centers on San Francisco in the near future and evinces Gibson's recurring themes of technological, physical, and spiritual transcendence in a more grounded, matter-of-fact style than his first trilogy.^[49] In the Bridge trilogy, Gibson's villains change from transnational corporations and artificial intelligences of the Sprawl trilogy to the media – namely tabloid television and the cult of celebrity.^[50] Virtual Light depicts an "end-stage capitalism, in which private enterprise and the profit motive are taken to their logical conclusion" (Mail & Guardian).^[51] Salon.com considered Idoru a "return to form" for Gibson,^[52] while critic Steven Poole asserted that All Tomorrow's Parties marked his development from "science-fiction hotshot to wry sociologist of the near future."^[53]

Gibson at an Amazon Fishbowl event in Seattle, Washington, 2007-08-06.

…I felt that I was trying to describe an unthinkable present and I actually feel that science fiction's best use today is the exploration of contemporary reality rather than any attempt to predict where we are going…The best thing you can do with science today is use it to explore the present. Earth is the alien planet now.

—William Gibson in an interview on CNN, August 26, 1997.

After All Tomorrow's Parties, Gibson began to adopt a more realistic style of writing, with continuous narratives - "speculative fiction of the very recent past."^[54] Critic John Clute has interpreted this approach by Gibson as the recognition that traditional science fiction is no longer possible "in a world lacking coherent 'nows' to continue from", characterizing it as "SF for the new century".^[55] Gibson's novels Pattern Recognition (2003), and Spook Country (2007), were both set in the same contemporary universe - "more or less the same one we live in now" ^[56] - and put Gibson's work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.^[57] As well as the setting, the novels share some of the same characters, including Hubertus Bigend and Pamela Mainwaring - employees of the enigmatic marketing company Blue Ant.

A phenomenon peculiar to this era was the independent development of annotating fansites, PR-Otaku and Node Magazine, devoted to Pattern Recognition and Spook Country respectively.^[4] These websites tracked the references and story elements in the novels through online resources such as Google and Wikipedia and collated the results, essentially creating hypertext versions of the books.^[58] Critic John Sutherland characterised this phenomenon as threatening "to completely overhaul the way literary criticism is conducted".^[59]

Gibson viewed the September 11, 2001 attacks as a nodal point in recent history, "an experience out of culture",^[60] "in some ways…the true beginning of the 21st century."^[16] With Pattern Recognition, Gibson received critical praise for being one of the first novelists to write about the attacks.^[24] Having written 100 pages of the novel prior to the attacks, he described their subsequent effect on his characters development as "the strangest experience I've ever had with a piece of fiction."^[61] A prominent theme of Gibson's later work has been the examination of cultural changes in post-September 11th America,^[62]including the "infantilization of society".^[63] The focus of his writing nevertheless remains, in the words of the Providence Journal, "at the intersection of paranoia and technology."^[64]

Bruce Sterling (left) at Robofest '94. Sterling co-authored with Gibson the short story "Red Star, Winter Orbit" (1983) and the 1990 steampunk novel The Difference Engine.

Three out of Gibson's ten early stories later collected in Burning Chrome were written in collaboration; "The Belonging Kind" (1981) with John Shirley, "Red Star, Winter Orbit" (1983) with Bruce Sterling,^[4] and "Dogfight" (1985) with Michael Swanwick. Gibson had previously written the foreword to Shirley's 1980 novel City Come A-walkin'^[65] and the pair's collaboration continued when Gibson wrote the introduction to Shirley's short story collection Heatseeker (1989). ^[66] Shirley convinced Gibson to write a story for the television series Max Headroom for which Shirley had written several scripts, but the network canceled the series.^[67]

Neither was "Red Star, Winter Orbit" the last collaboration of Gibson and Sterling; in 1990, they co-wrote the short story "The Angel of Goliad",^[66] which they expanded into the alternate history novel The Difference Engine, published the same year. They were "invited to dream in public" (Gibson) in a joint address to the U.S National Academy of Sciences Convocation on Technology and Education in 1993 ("the Al Gore people"^[67]), in which they argued against the digital divide^[68] and "appalled everyone" by proposing that all schools be put online, with education taking place over the Internet.^[69] In a 2007 interview, Gibson revealed that Sterling had an idea for "a second recursive science novel that was just a wonderful idea", but that Gibson was unable to pursue the collaboration due to not being creatively free at the time.^[54]

In 1993, Gibson contributed lyrics and featured as a guest vocalist on Yellow Magic Orchestra's Technodon album,^[70][71] and wrote lyrics to the track "Dog Star Girl" for Deborah Harry's Debravation.^[72]

Pinball machine based on the film Johnny Mnemonic (1995), an adaptation by Robert Longo from Gibson's short story of the same name.

Early efforts by Gibson at writing film scripts failed to manifest themselves as finished product; "Burning Chrome" (which had Kathryn Bigelow attached) and "Neuro-Hotel" were two attempts by the author at film adaptations that were never made.^[67] In the late 1980s he wrote an early treatment of Alien³ (which he later characterized as "Tarkovskian"), few elements of which survived in the final version.^[67] Gibson's early involvement with the film industry extended far beyond the confines of the Hollywood blockbuster system, however. At one point, he was collaborating on a script with Kazakh director Rashid Nugmanov after an American producer had expressed an interest in a Soviet-American collaboration to star Russian-Korean star Victor Tsoi.^[73] Despite being occupied with writing a novel, Gibson was reluctant to abandon the "wonderfully odd project" which involved "ritualistic gang-warfare in some sort of sideways-future Leningrad" and sent Jack Womack to Russia in his stead. Rather than producing a motion picture, a prospect which Tsoi's death in an automotive accident put paid to, Womack's experiences in Russia ultimately culminated in his novel Let's Put the Future Behind Us and informed much of the Russian content of Gibson's Pattern Recognition.^[73] A similarly doomed fate befell Gibson's mooted collaboration with Japanese filmmaker Sogo Ishii in 1991,^[33] a film they plotted on shooting in the Walled City of Kowloon prior to its demolition by the Chinese government.^[11]

Adaptations of Gibson's fiction have frequently been optioned and proposed, to limited success. Two of the author's short stories, both set in the Sprawl trilogy universe, have been loosely adapted as films: Johnny Mnemonic (1995) with screenplay by Gibson and starring Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren and Takeshi Kitano, and New Rose Hotel (1998), starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, and Asia Argento. The former was the first time in history that a book was launched simultaneously as a film and a CD-ROM interactive video game.^[51] Neuromancer, after a long stay in development hell, is in the process of adaptation as of 2007,^[74] Count Zero was at one point being developed as The Zen Differential with director Michael Mann attached, and the third novel in the Sprawl trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive, has also been optioned and bought.^[75] An anime adaptation of Idoru was announced as in development in 2006,^[76] and Pattern Recognition was in the process of development by director Peter Weir, although the latter is according to Gibson no longer attached to the project.^[77]

Television is another arena in which Gibson has collaborated; he wrote, with friend Tom Maddox, the X-Files episodes "Kill Switch" and "First Person Shooter", broadcast in the U.S. on 20th Century Fox Television in 1998 and 2000,^[78][40] and in 1998 contributed the introduction to the spin-off publication Art of the X-Files. Gibson made a cameo appearance in the television miniseries Wild Palms at the behest of creator Bruce Wagner.^[79] Director Oliver Stone had borrowed heavily from Gibson's novels to make the series,^[48] and in the aftermath of its cancellation Gibson contributed an article, "Where The Holograms Go", to the Wild Palms Reader.^[79] He reprised his acting role in 2002, appearing alongside Douglas Coupland in the short film Mon Amour Mon Parapluie in which the pair played philosophers.^[80] Appearances in fiction aside, Gibson was the focus of a biographical documentary film by Mark Neale in 2000 called No Maps for These Territories. The documentary follows Gibson over the course of a drive across North America discussing various aspects of his life, literary career and cultural interpretations. It features interviews with Jack Womack and Bruce Sterling, as well as recitations from Neuromancer by Bono and The Edge.^[22]

Gibson has frequently collaborated with performance artists such as theatre group La Fura dels Baus, pictured here performing at the Singapore Arts Festival on 2007-05-27.

Gibson has contributed text to be integrated into a number of performance art pieces. In October 1989, Gibson wrote text for such a collaboration with future Johnny Mnemonic director Robert Longo entitled Dream Jumbo: Working the Absolutes, which was displayed in Royce Hall, University of California Los Angeles. Three years later, Gibson contributed original text to "Memory Palace", a performance show featuring the theater group La Fura dels Baus at Art Futura '92, Barcelona, which featured images by Karl Sims, Rebecca Allen, Mark Pellington and music by Peter Gabriel and others.^[70] It was at Art Futura '92 that Gibson met Charlie Athanas, who would later adapt "Burning Chrome" for the stage. Gibson's latest contribution was in 1997, a collaboration with critically acclaimed Vancouver-based contemporary dance company Holy Body Tattoo and Gibson's friend and future webmaster Christopher Halcrow.^[81]

In 1990, Gibson contributed to "Visionary San Francisco", an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shown from June 14-August 26 of that year.^[82] He wrote a short story, Skinner's Room, set in a decaying San Francisco in which the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was closed and taken over by the homeless – a setting Gibson later revisited in the Bridge trilogy. The story inspired a contribution to the exhibition by architects Ming Fung and Craig Hodgetts that envisioned a San Francisco in which the rich live above the decrepit city and its crumbling bridge in high-tech, solar-powered towers.^[83] The architects exhibit featured the author on a monitor discussing the future and reading from "Skinner's Room".^[70]The New York Times hailed the exhibition as "one of the most ambitious, and admirable, efforts to address the realm of architecture and cities that any museum in the country has mounted in the last decade", despite calling Ming and Hodgetts reaction to Gibson's contribution "a powerful, but sad and not a little cynical, work".^[83] A slightly different version of the short story was featured a year later in Omni.^[84]

A particularly well-received work by Gibson was Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (1992), a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem that was his contribution to a collaborative project with artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr.^[85] Gibson's text focused on the ethereal nature of memories (the title refers to a photo album) and was originally published on a 3.5" floppy disk embedded in the back of an artist's book containing etchings by Ashbaugh (intended to fade from view once the book was opened and exposed to light - they never did, however). Gibson commented that Ashbaugh's design "eventually included a supposedly self-devouring floppy-disk intended to display the text only once, then eat itself."^[86] Contrary to numerous colorful reports, the diskettes were never actually "hacked." Instead the poem was manually transcribed from a surreptitious videotape of a public showing in Manhattan in December 1992, and released on the MindVox BBS the next day; this is the text that still circulates widely on the Internet today.^[87]

Gibson is a sporadic contributor to Wired, and has written for The Observer, Addicted to Noise, New York Times Magazine and Rolling Stone. He commenced writing a blog in January 2003, providing voyeuristic insights into his reaction to Pattern Recognition, but abated in September of the same year due to concerns that it might negatively affect his creative process.^[88][89] Gibson re-commenced blogging in October 2004, and during the process of writing Spook Country frequently posted short nonsequential excerpts from the novel to the blog.^[90][91][92]

William Gibson in a Wagamama restaurant in Bloomsbury, London in September of 2007. His fiction is hailed by critics for its characterization of late capitalism, postindustrial society and the portents of the information age.

Hailed by The Guardian in 1999 as "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades" in terms of influence,^[53] Gibson first achieved critical recognition with his debut novel, Neuromancer. The novel won three major science fiction awards - the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award, an achievement described by the Mail & Guardian as "the sci-fi writer's version of winning the Goncourt, Booker and Pulitzer prizes in the same year."^[51] Neuromancer gained unprecedented critical and popular attention outside science fiction,^[8] as an "evocation of life in the late 1980's",^[93] although The Observer noted that "it took the New York Times 10 years" to mention the novel.^[19]

His work received international attention^[20] and gained wider audiences than science fiction aficionados as, in the words of Laura Miller, "readers found startlingly prophetic reflections of contemporary life in [its] fantastic and often outright paranoid scenarios."^[94] It is often situated by critics within the context of postindustrialism as, according to academic David Brande, a construction of "a mirror of existing large-scale techno-social relations",^[95] and as a narrative version of postmodern consumer culture.^[96] It is praised by critics for its depictions of late capitalism^[95] and its "rewriting of subjectivity, human consciousness and behaviour made newly problematic by technology."^[96] In terms of recognition, The Literary Encyclopedia identifies Gibson as "one of North America's most highly acclaimed science fiction writers".^[20]

William Gibson - the man who made us cool.

—cyberpunk author Richard K Morgan^[13]

In his early short fiction, Gibson is credited by The Literary Encyclopedia as effectively renovating science fiction, a genre at that time considered widely "insignificant",^[20] influencing by means of the postmodern aesthetic of his writing the development of new perspectives in science fiction studies.^[39] In the words of filmmaker Marianne Trench, Gibson's visions "struck sparks in the real world" and "determined the way people thought and talked" to an extent unprecedented in science fiction literature.^[97] The publication of Neuromancer (1984) hit a cultural nerve,^[39] causing Larry McCaffery to credit Gibson with virtually launching the cyberpunk movement,^[8] as "the one major writer who is original and gifted to make the whole movement seem original and gifted."^[33]

Gibson (left) influenced cyberpunk^[13] and postcyberpunk writers such as Cory Doctorow (right), ^[12] whom he also consulted for technical advice while writing Spook Country.^[98]

His early novels were, according to The Observer, "seized upon by the emerging slacker and hacker generation as a kind of road map".^[19] Through Gibson's novels, words like "cyberspace", "netsurfing", "ICE", "jacking in", and "neural implants," entered popular usage, as did concepts such as net consciousness, virtual interaction and "the matrix."^[99] In "Burning Chrome" (1982), he coined the term "cyberspace",^[V] referring to the "mass consensual hallucination" of computer networks.^[100] Through its use in Neuromancer, the term gained such recognition that it became the de facto term for the World Wide Web during the 1990s.^[101] Artist Dike Blair has commented that Gibson's "terse descriptive phrases capture the moods which surround technologies, rather than their engineering."^[102]

Gibson's work has influenced several popular musicians; references to his fiction appear in the music of Stuart Hamm,^[I] Billy Idol,^[II] Warren Zevon,^[III] Deltron 3030, Straylight Run^[103] and Sonic Youth. U2's Zooropa album was heavily influenced by Neuromancer,^[46] and the band at one point planned to scroll the text of Neuromancer above them on a concert tour, although this did not end up happening. Members of the band did, however, provide background music for the audiobook version of Neuromancer as well as appearing in No Maps for These Territories, a biographical documentary of Gibson.^[104] He returned the favour in writing an article in August 2005 entitled "U2's City of Blinding Lights" about the band's Vertigo Tour for Wired.^[105]

In the landmark cyberpunk film The Matrix (1999), the title, characters and story elements drew inspiration from the Sprawl trilogy.^[106] The characters of Neo and Trinity in The Matrix show similarities to Bobby Newmark (Count Zero) and Molly ("Johnny Mnemonic", Neuromancer).^[75] Like Turner, protagonist of Gibson's Count Zero, characters in The Matrix download instructions (to fly a helicopter and to "know kung fu" respectively) directly into their heads, and both Neuromancer and The Matrix feature artificial intelligences which strive to free themselves from human control.^[75] Critics have identified marked similarities between Neuromancer and the film's cinematography and tone.^[107] Despite being initially reticent about seeing the film on its release,^[22] Gibson later described it as "arguably the ultimate “cyberpunk” artifact."^[1]

The disposition of arcade gamers toward their consoles, their intensity of focus and posture, and their immersion in the visualised dataflows inspired Gibson's conception of cyberspace.

The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.

—William Gibson, quoted in The Economist, December 4, 2003^[108]

In Neuromancer, Gibson first used the term 'matrix' to refer to the visualised Internet, two years after the nascent Internet was formed in the early 1980s from the computer networks of the 1970s.^{[109][110][111]} In this conception of the "matrix", he predicted a worldwide communications network eleven years before the origin of the World Wide Web,^[40] although related notions had been described elsewhere.^[V] At the time of writing "Burning Chrome", Gibson "had a hunch that [the Internet] would change things, in the same way that the ubiquity of the automobile changed things."^[22] In 1995, he identified the advent, evolution and growth of the Internet as "one of the most fascinating and unprecedented human achievements of the century", a new kind of civilization that is – in terms of significance – on a par with the birth of cities,^[69] and in 2000 predicted it would lead to the death of the nation state.^[22]

Observers contend that Gibson's influence on the development of the Web reached beyond prediction; he is widely credited with creating an iconography for the information age, long before the embrace of the Internet by the mainstream.^[25] In writing the Sprawl trilogy, Larry McCaffery claims that Gibson laid the "conceptual foundations for the explosive real-world growth of virtual environments in videogames and the Web".^[53] In his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack suggests that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the Internet (and the Web particularly) developed, following the publication of Neuromancer in 1984, asking "what if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"^[112]

Gibson scholar Tatiani G. Rapatzikou has commented, in Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson, on the origin of the notion of cyberspace:

Gibson's vision, generated by the monopolising appearance of the terminal image and presented in his creation of the cyberspace matrix, came to him when he saw teenagers playing in video arcades. The physical intensity of their postures, and the realistic interpretation of the terminal spaces projected by these games - as if there were a real space behind the screen - made apparent the manipulation of the real by its own representation.^[113]

In his Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, Gibson is credited with being one of the few observers to explore the portents of the information age for notions of the sociospatial structuring of cities.^[114] Not all responses to Gibson's visions are positive, however; virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce, though acknowledging their heavy influence on him and that "[n]o other writer had so eloquently and emotionally effected the direction of the hacker community,"^[115] dismissed them as "adolescent fantasies of violence and disembodiment".^[116] In Pattern Recognition, the plot revolves around snippets of film footage posted anonymously to various locations on the Internet. Characters in the novel speculate about the filmmaker's identity, motives, methods and inspirations on several websites, anticipating the 2006 Lonelygirl15 internet phenomenon. However, Gibson later refuted the notion that the creators of the Lonelygirl15 drew influence from him.^[117] Another phenomenon anticipated by Gibson is the rise of reality television,^[10] as alluded to in Virtual Light, which featured an satirical extrapolated version of COPS.^[118]

Gibson has never had a special relationship with computers – until 1996 he did not have an email address, or even a modem, which he claimed at the time was motivated by a desire to avoid correspondence that would distract him from writing.^[69] His first exposure to a website came while writing Idoru when he was persuaded to let a web developer, Chris Halcrow build one for him.^[7] An anecdote oft-recited in cybercultural enclaves and English departments holds that Neuromancer was written on a manual typewriter;^[119] the author has confirmed that the novel was written on a 1927 model of an olive-green Hermes portable typewriter, which looked to him as "the kind of thing Hemingway would have used in the field."^[51] In 2007 he said:

I have a 2005 PowerBook G4, a gig of memory, wireless router. That's it. I'm anything but an early adopter, generally. In fact, I've never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don't watch them; I watch how people behave around them. That's becoming more difficult to do because everything is "around them."^[56]

Main article: Works of William Gibson

• Olsen, Lance (1992). William Gibson. San Bernardino: Borgo Press. ISBN 1557421986. 
• Cavallaro, Dani (2000). Cyberpunk and Cyberculture. London: Athlone Press. ISBN 9780485006070. 
• Tatsumi, Takayuki (2006). Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822337744. 
• Yoke, Carl (2007). The Cultural Influences of William Gibson, the "Father" of Cyberpunk Science Fiction. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Pr. ISBN 9780773454675. OCLC 173809083.