William Gibson

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For other people named William Gibson, see William Gibson (disambiguation).
"Gibsonian" redirects here. For the school of psychology, see
Gibsonian psychology
.

William Gibson
Prix Aurora (1995),[2] Inkpot (2016)[3]
Website
williamgibsonbooks.com

William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian

information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s.[5] Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer
(1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.

After expanding on the story in Neuromancer with two more novels (

dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson collaborated with Bruce Sterling on the alternate history novel The Difference Engine (1990), which became an important work of the science fiction subgenre known as steampunk
.

In the 1990s, Gibson composed the

postindustrial society, and late capitalism. Following the turn of the century and the events of 9/11, Gibson emerged with a string of increasingly realist novels—Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010)—set in a roughly contemporary world. These works saw his name reach mainstream bestseller lists for the first time. His most recent novels, The Peripheral (2014) and Agency
(2020), returned to a more overt engagement with technology and recognizable science fiction themes.

In 1999,

cyberculture
, and technology.

Early life

beat generation
writer, was an important influence on the adolescent Gibson.

Childhood, itinerance, and adolescence

William Ford Gibson was born in the coastal city of

Appalachians where his parents had been born and raised.[7][8] His family moved frequently during Gibson's youth owing to his father's position as manager of a large construction company.[9] In Norfolk, Virginia, Gibson attended Pines Elementary School, where the teachers' lack of encouragement for him to read was a cause of dismay for his parents.[10] While Gibson was still a young child,[a] a little over a year into his stay at Pines Elementary,[10] his father choked to death in a restaurant while on a business trip.[7] His mother, unable to tell William the bad news, had someone else inform him of the death.[11] Tom Maddox has commented that Gibson "grew up in an America as disturbing and surreal as anything J. G. Ballard ever dreamed".[12]

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[11]

A few days after the death of his father, Gibson and his mother moved back from Norfolk to Wytheville.

Beat generation writing, thereby gaining exposure to the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs; the lattermost had a particularly pronounced effect, greatly altering Gibson's notions of the possibilities of science fiction literature.[15][16]

A shy, ungainly teenager, Gibson grew up in a monoculture he found "highly problematic",

depressive" mother, who had remained in Wytheville since the death of her husband, sent him to Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson.[7][8][13] He resented the structure of the private boarding school but was in retrospect grateful for its forcing him to engage socially.[10]

Draft-dodging, exile, and counterculture

Gibson at a 2007 reading of Spook Country in Victoria, British Columbia. Since "The Winter Market" (1985), commissioned by Vancouver Magazine with the stipulation that it be set in the city, Gibson actively avoided using his adopted home as a setting until Spook Country.[18]

After his mother's death when he was 18,

conscientious objection than by a desire to "sleep with hippie chicks" and indulge in hashish.[13]
He elaborated on the topic in a 2008 interview:

When I started out as a writer I took credit for draft evasion where I shouldn't have. I washed up in Canada with some vague idea of evading the draft but then I was never drafted so I never had to make the call. I don't know what I would have done if I'd really been drafted. I wasn't a tightly wrapped package at that time. If somebody had drafted me I might have wept and gone. I wouldn't have liked it of course.

— William Gibson, interview with io9, June 10, 2008[19]

After weeks of nominal homelessness, Gibson was hired as the manager of Toronto's first head shop, a retailer of drug paraphernalia.[20] He found the city's émigré community of American draft dodgers unbearable owing to the prevalence of clinical depression, suicide, and hardcore substance abuse.[13] He appeared, during the Summer of Love of 1967, in a CBC newsreel item about hippie subculture in Yorkville, Toronto,[21] for which he was paid $500—the equivalent of 20 weeks' rent—which financed his later travels.[22]

Gibson spent a "brief, riot-torn spell" in Washington, D.C., where he completed his high school diploma at the age of 21. He spent the rest of the 1960s in Toronto, where he met Vancouverite Deborah Jean Thompson,[23] with whom he subsequently traveled to Europe.[7] Gibson has recounted that they concentrated their travels on European nations with fascist regimes and favorable exchange rates, including spending time on a Greek archipelago and in Istanbul in 1970,[24] as they "couldn't afford to stay anywhere that had anything remotely like hard currency".[25]

The couple married and settled in

Susan Wood, at the end of which he was encouraged to write his first short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose".[9]

Early writing and the evolution of cyberpunk

After considering pursuing a master's degree on the topic of

fascist literature,[16] Gibson discontinued writing in the year that followed graduation and, as one critic put it, expanded his collection of punk records.[28] 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.[9] Impatient at much of what he saw at a science fiction convention in Vancouver in 1980 or 1981, Gibson found a kindred spirit in fellow panelist, punk musician and author John Shirley.[29] The two became immediate and lifelong friends. Shirley persuaded Gibson to sell his early short stories and to take writing seriously.[28][29]

In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for anything like "career," I found myself dusting off my twelve-year-old's interest in science fiction. Simultaneously, weird noises were heard from New York and London. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign. And I began, then, to write.

—William Gibson, "Since 1948"[7]

Through Shirley, Gibson came into contact with science fiction authors Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner; reading Gibson's work, they realized 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."[13][30] 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".[13]

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".[30] After a weekend discussing rock and roll, MTV, Japan, fashion, drugs and politics, Gibson left the cadre for Vancouver, declaring half-jokingly that "a new axis has been formed."[30] Sterling, Shiner, Shirley and Gibson, along with Rudy Rucker, went on to form the core of the radical cyberpunk literary movement.[31]

Literary career

Early short fiction

Further information: Burning Chrome (short story collection)

Gibson's early writings are generally near-future stories about the influences of cybernetics and cyberspace (computer-simulated reality) technology on the human species. His themes of hi-tech shanty towns, 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", in the Summer 1977 issue of Unearth.[16][32] The latter thematic obsession was described by his friend and fellow author, Bruce Sterling, in the introduction of Gibson's short story collection Burning Chrome, as "Gibson's classic one-two combination of lowlife and high tech."[33]

Beginning in 1981,[32] Gibson's stories appeared in Omni and Universe 11, wherein his fiction developed a bleak, film noir feel. He consciously distanced himself as far as possible from the mainstream of science fiction (towards which he felt "an aesthetic revulsion", expressed in "The Gernsback Continuum"), to the extent that his highest goal was to become "a minor cult figure, a sort of lesser Ballard."[16] When Sterling started to distribute the stories, he found that "people were just genuinely baffled ... I mean they literally could not parse the guy's paragraphs ... the imaginative tropes he was inventing were just beyond people's grasp."[13]

While Larry McCaffery has commented that these early short stories displayed flashes of Gibson's ability, science fiction critic Darko Suvin has identified them as "undoubtedly [cyberpunk's] best works", constituting the "furthest horizon" of the genre.[29] The themes which Gibson developed in the stories, the Sprawl setting of "Burning Chrome" and the character of Molly Millions from "Johnny Mnemonic" ultimately culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer.[29]

Neuromancer

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

—opening sentence of Neuromancer (1984)

Neuromancer was commissioned by Terry Carr for the second series of Ace Science Fiction Specials, which was intended to feature debut novels exclusively. Given a year to complete the work,[34] 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".[16] After viewing the first 20 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. Everyone would assume I'd copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film."[35] He re-wrote the first two-thirds of the book twelve times, feared 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.[16]

Neuromancer's release was not greeted with fanfare, but it hit a cultural nerve,

paperback original[2]— eventually selling more than 6.5 million copies worldwide.[37]

Lawrence Person in his "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto" (1998) identified Neuromancer as "the archetypal cyberpunk work".[38]

In 2005, as part of the Time list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, Lev Grossman opined of Neuromancer: "There is no way to overstate how radical Gibson's first and best novel was when it first appeared."[39]

Literary critic

adolescent's book".[13] The success of Neuromancer nonetheless led to the 35-year-old Gibson's emergence from obscurity.[40]

Sprawl trilogy, The Difference Engine, and Bridge trilogy

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 Bridge trilogy

Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained rooted in Neuromancer, his work continued to evolve conceptually and stylistically.

dustjacket art of their hardcover of Count Zero.[42] Abandoning The Log of the Mustang Sally, Gibson instead wrote Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), which in the words of Larry McCaffery "turned off the lights" on cyberpunk literature.[16][29] It was a culmination of his previous two novels, set in the same universe with shared characters, thereby completing the Sprawl trilogy. The trilogy solidified Gibson's reputation,[43] with both later novels also earning Nebula and Hugo Award and Locus SF Award nominations.[44][45][46]

The Sprawl trilogy was followed by the 1990 novel

John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1992, and its success drew attention to the nascent steampunk literary genre of which it remains the best-known work.[47][48]

Gibson's second series, the "

cult of celebrity.[51] Virtual Light depicts an "end-stage capitalism, in which private enterprise and the profit motive are taken to their logical conclusion", according to one review.[52] Leonard's review called Idoru a "return to form" for Gibson,[53] while critic Steven Poole asserted that All Tomorrow's Parties marked his development from "science-fiction hotshot to wry sociologist of the near future."[54]

Blue Ant books

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 realist style of writing, with continuous narratives – "speculative fiction of the very recent past."[55] Science fiction critic John Clute has interpreted this approach as Gibson's 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".[56] Gibson's novels Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010) are set in the same contemporary universe — "more or less the same one we live in now"[57] — and put Gibson's work on to mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.[58] 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.

Gibson signing one of his novels in 2010

When asked on Twitter what this series of novels should be called ("The Bigend Trilogy? The Blue Ant Cycle? What?"), Gibson replied "I prefer 'books'. The Bigend books."[59] However, "Blue Ant" rather than "Bigend" has become the standard signifier.[60][61] At a later date, Gibson stated that he did not name his trilogies, "I wait to see what people call them,"[62] and has in 2016 used "the Blue Ant books" in a tweet.[63]

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.[64] 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.[65] Critic John Sutherland characterized this phenomenon as threatening "to completely overhaul the way literary criticism is conducted".[66]

About 100 pages into writing Pattern Recognition, Gibson felt impelled to re-write the main character's backstory, which had been suddenly rendered implausible by the September 11, 2001, attacks; he described this as "the strangest experience I've ever had with a piece of fiction."[67] He saw the attacks as a nodal point in history, "an experience out of culture",[68] and "in some ways ... the true beginning of the 21st century."[69] He is noted as one of the first novelists to use the attacks to inform his writing.[18] Examination of cultural changes in post-September 11 America, including a resurgent tribalism and the "infantilization of society",[70][71] became a prominent theme of Gibson's work,[72] while his focus nevertheless remained "at the intersection of paranoia and technology".[73]

The Jackpot trilogy and graphic novels

The Peripheral, the first in a new series of novels by William Gibson, was released on October 28, 2014.[74] He described the story briefly in an appearance he made at the New York Public Library on April 19, 2013, and read an excerpt from the first chapter of the book entitled "The Gone Haptics."[75] The story takes place in two eras, one about thirty years into the future and the other further in the future.[76]

In 2017, Gibson's comic/graphic novel Archangel was published. Both Archangel and The Peripheral contain time travel (of sorts), but Gibson has clarified that the works are not related: "They're not 'same universe'. The Splitter and trans-continual virtuality are different mechanisms (different plot mechanisms too)."[77] The next year, Dark Horse Comics began releasing Johnnie Christmas' adaptation of Gibson's Alien 3 script in five parts,[78] resulting in a hardcover collection being published in 2019.[79]

The Peripheral's continuation, Agency, was released on January 21, 2020, after being delayed from an initial announced release date of December 2018.[80] Gibson said in a New Yorker magazine article that both the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President and the controversy over Cambridge Analytica had caused him to rethink and revise the text.[81] The working title for the third novel in the series was Jackpot,[82] which Gibson had a change of heart on in January 2021: "I don't think I'm going to call Agency's sequel Jackpot after all. Not because of [Jackpot by Michael Mechanic], which I look forward to reading, but because Agency was originally called Tulpagotchi. Which I still like, but would've been a different book."[83]

Collaborations, adaptations, and miscellanea

Bruce Sterling, co-author with Gibson of the short story "Red Star, Winter Orbit" (1983) and the 1990 steampunk novel The Difference Engine

Literary collaborations

Three of the stories that later appeared in Burning Chrome were written in collaboration with other authors: "The Belonging Kind" (1981) with John Shirley, "Red Star, Winter Orbit" (1983) with Sterling,[64] and "Dogfight" (1985) with Michael Swanwick. Gibson had previously written the foreword to Shirley's 1980 novel City Come A-walkin'[84] and the pair's collaboration continued when Gibson wrote the introduction to Shirley's short story collection Heatseeker (1989).[85] 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.[86]

Gibson and Sterling collaborated again on the short story "The Angel of Goliad" in 1990,

recursive science novel that was just a wonderful idea", but that Gibson was unable to pursue the collaboration because he was not creatively free at the time.[55]

In 1993, Gibson contributed lyrics and featured as a guest vocalist on Yellow Magic Orchestra's Technodon album,[89][90] and wrote lyrics to the track "Dog Star Girl" for Deborah Harry's Debravation.[91]

Film adaptations, screenplays, and appearances

Gibson was first solicited to work as a screenwriter after a film producer discovered a waterlogged copy of Neuromancer on a beach at a

audio drama of Gibson's script, adapted by Dirk Maggs and with Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen reprising their roles.[93]

Gibson's early involvement with the film industry extended far beyond the confines of the Hollywood blockbuster system. At one point, he collaborated on a script with Kazakh director

Walled City of Kowloon until the city was demolished in 1993.[95]

television episodes
.

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

BAFTA award-winning writer and director Simon Pummell. Written by Gibson and Michael Swanwick and first published in Omni in July 1985, the film is being developed by British producer Janine Marmot at Hot Property Films.[100]

Television is another arena in which Gibson has collaborated; with friend Tom Maddox, he co-wrote The X-Files episodes "Kill Switch" and "First Person Shooter", broadcast in 1998 and 2000.[41][101] In 1998 he 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.[102] Director Oliver Stone had borrowed heavily from Gibson's novels to make the series,[49] and in the aftermath of its cancellation Gibson contributed an article, "Where The Holograms Go", to the Wild Palms Reader.[102] He accepted another acting role in 2002, appearing alongside Douglas Coupland in the short film Mon Amour Mon Parapluie in which the pair played philosophers.[103] Appearances in fiction aside, Gibson was the focus of a biographical documentary by Mark Neale in 2000 called No Maps for These Territories. The film 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.[13]

Amazon released The Peripheral, a TV series from the producers of Westworld based on Gibson's novel of the same name, in October 2022.

Exhibitions, poetry, and performance art

Singapore Arts Festival
in May 2007.

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 acclaimed sculptor and future Johnny Mnemonic director Robert Longo[40] titled 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 with music by Peter Gabriel and others.[89] It was at Art Futura '92 that Gibson met Charlie Athanas, who would later act as dramaturg and "cyberprops" designer on Steve Pickering and Charley Sherman's adaptation of "Burning Chrome" for the Chicago 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.[104]

In 1990, Gibson contributed to "Visionary San Francisco", an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shown from June 14 to August 26.[105] 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 then detailed 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 in high-tech, solar-powered towers, above the decrepit city and its crumbling bridge.[106] The architects exhibit featured Gibson on a monitor discussing the future and reading from "Skinner's Room".[89] 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's reaction to Gibson's contribution "a powerful, but sad and not a little cynical, work".[106] A slightly different version of the short story was featured a year later in Omni.[107]

Cryptography

A particularly well-received work by Gibson was

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 bulletin board the next day; this is the text that circulated widely on the Internet.[110]

Since its debut in 1992, the mystery of Agrippa remained hidden for 20 years. Although many had tried to hack the code and decrypt the program, the uncompiled source code was lost long ago. Alan Liu and his team at "The Agrippa Files"[111] created an extensive website with tools and resources to crack the Agrippa Code. They collaborated with Matthew Kirschenbaum at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Digital Forensics Lab, and Quinn DuPont, a PhD student of cryptography from the University of Toronto, in calling for the aid of cryptographers to figure out how the program works by creating "Cracking the Agrippa Code: The Challenge",[112] which enlisted participants to solve the intentional scrambling of the poem in exchange for prizes.[113] The code was successfully cracked by Robert Xiao in late July 2012.[112]

Essays and short-form nonfiction

Gibson is a sporadic contributor of non-fiction articles to newspapers and journals. He has occasionally contributed longer-form articles to

Details Magazine. His first major piece of nonfiction, the article "Disneyland with the Death Penalty", concerning the city-state of Singapore, resulted in Wired being banned from the country and attracted a spirited critical response.[114][115] 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 owing to concerns that it might negatively affect his creative process.[116][117]

information age
.

Gibson recommenced blogging in October 2004, and during the process of writing Spook Country – and to a lesser extent Zero History – frequently posted short nonsequential excerpts from the novel to the blog.[118] The blog was largely discontinued by July 2009, after the writer had undertaken prolific microblogging on Twitter under the nom de plume "GreatDismal".[119] In 2012, Gibson released a collection of his non-fiction works entitled Distrust That Particular Flavor.[120]

Influence and recognition

See also: List of awards and nominations received by William Gibson

Gibson's prose has been analyzed by a number of scholars, including a dedicated 2011 book,

Pulitzer prizes in the same year".[52] Neuromancer gained unprecedented critical and popular attention outside science fiction,[16] as an "evocation of life in the late 1980s",[122] although The Observer noted that "it took the New York Times 10 years" to mention the novel.[8]

Gibson's work has received international attention

postindustrialism as, according to academic David Brande, a construction of "a mirror of existing large-scale techno-social relations",[124] and as a narrative version of postmodern consumer culture.[125] It is praised by critics for its depictions of late capitalism[124] and its "rewriting of subjectivity, human consciousness and behaviour made newly problematic by technology."[125] Tatiani Rapatzikou, writing in The Literary Encyclopedia, identifies Gibson as "one of North America's most highly acclaimed science fiction writers".[9]

Cultural significance

William Gibson – the man who made us cool.

—cyberpunk author

Richard K Morgan[126]

In his early short fiction, Gibson is credited by Rapatzikou in The Literary Encyclopedia with effectively "renovating" science fiction, a genre at that time considered widely "insignificant",[9] influencing by means of the postmodern aesthetic of his writing the development of new perspectives in science fiction studies.[36] 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.[127] The publication of Neuromancer (1984) hit a cultural nerve,[36] causing Larry McCaffery to credit Gibson with virtually launching the cyberpunk movement,[16] as "the one major writer who is original and gifted to make the whole movement seem original and gifted."[29][b] Aside from their central importance to cyberpunk and steampunk fiction, Gibson's fictional works have been hailed by space historian Dwayne A. Day as some of the best examples of space-based science fiction (or "solar sci-fi"), and "probably the only ones that rise above mere escapism to be truly thought-provoking".[128]

postcyberpunk writers such as Cory Doctorow (right),[129] whom he also consulted for technical advice while writing Spook Country.[130]

Gibson's early novels were, according to The Observer, "seized upon by the emerging slacker and hacker generation as a kind of road map".[8] Through his novels, such terms as

neural implants entered popular usage, as did concepts such as net consciousness, virtual interaction and "the matrix".[131] In "Burning Chrome" (1982), he coined the term cyberspace,[c][132] referring to the "mass consensual hallucination" of computer networks.[133] 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.[134] Artist Dike Blair has commented that Gibson's "terse descriptive phrases capture the moods which surround technologies, rather than their engineering."[135]

Gibson's work has influenced several popular musicians: references to his fiction appear in the music of Stuart Hamm,[d] Billy Idol,[e] Warren Zevon,[f] Deltron 3030, Straylight Run (whose name is derived from a sequence in Neuromancer)[139] and Sonic Youth. U2's Zooropa album was heavily influenced by Neuromancer,[43] 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.[140] He returned the favour by writing an article about the band's Vertigo Tour for Wired in August 2005.[141] The band Zeromancer take their name from Neuromancer.[142]

The film

Science Fiction Hall of Fame that same year,[147]
presented by his close friend and collaborator Jack Womack.

Visionary influence and prescience

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

—William Gibson[148][149]

In Neuromancer, Gibson first used the term "matrix" to refer to the visualized Internet, two years after the nascent modern Internet was formed in the early 1980s from the computer networks of the 1970s.[150][151][152] Gibson thereby imagined a worldwide communications network years before the origin of the World Wide Web,[41] although related notions had previously been imagined by others, including science fiction writers.[g][b] At the time he wrote "Burning Chrome", Gibson "had a hunch that [the Internet] would change things, in the same way that the ubiquity of the automobile changed things."[13] 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,[88] and in 2000 predicted it would lead to the death of the nation state.[13]

cyberculture
. Image captured in the Scylla bookstore of Paris, France, on March 14, 2008.

Observers contend that Gibson's influence on the development of the Web reached beyond prediction; he is widely credited with creating an

Parsons The New School for Design.[159] Steven Poole claims that in writing the Sprawl trilogy Gibson laid the "conceptual foundations for the explosive real-world growth of virtual environments in video games and the Web".[54] 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?"[160]

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.[161]

In his

COPS.[166]

Visionary writer is OK. Prophet is just not true. One of the things that made me like Bruce Sterling immediately when first I met him, back in 1991. [sic] We shook hands and he said "We've got a great job! We got to be charlatans and we're paid for it. We make this shit up and people believe it."

—Gibson in interview with ActuSf, March 2008[71]

When an interviewer in 1988 asked about the

Bulletin Board System jargon in his writing, Gibson answered "I'd never so much as touched a PC when I wrote Neuromancer"; he was familiar, he said, with the science-fiction community, which overlapped with the BBS community. Gibson similarly did not play computer games despite appearing in his stories.[167] He wrote Neuromancer on a 1927 olive-green Hermes portable typewriter, which Gibson described as "the kind of thing Hemingway would have used in the field".[52][167][h] By 1988 he used an Apple IIc and AppleWorks to write, with a modem ("I don't really use it for anything"),[167] but until 1996 Gibson did not have an email address, a lack he explained at the time to have been motivated by a desire to avoid correspondence that would distract him from writing.[88] His first exposure to a website came while writing Idoru when a web developer built one for Gibson.[168] 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'."[57]

Selected works

Main article:
List of works by William Gibson

Media appearances

Explanatory notes

  1. ^ The New York Times Magazine[11] and Gibson himself[7] report his age at the time of his father's death to be six years old, while Gibson scholar Tatiani Rapatzikou claims in The Literary Encyclopedia that he was eight years old.[9]
  2. ^ a b The idea of a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site was first described in 1962 in a series of memos on the "Galactic Computer Network" by J. C. R. Licklider of DARPA.[155]
  3. ^ Gibson later successfully resisted attempts by Autodesk to copyright the word for their abortive foray into virtual reality.[43]
  4. ^ Several track names on Hamm's Kings of Sleep album ("Black Ice", "Count Zero", "Kings of Sleep") reference Gibson's work.[136]
  5. ^ Idol released an album in 1993 titled Cyberpunk, which featured a track named Neuromancer.[43] Robert Christgau excoriated Idol's treatment of cyberpunk,[137] and Gibson later stated that Idol had "turned it into something very silly."[86]
  6. ^ Zevon's 1989 album Transverse City was inspired by Gibson's fiction.[138]
  7. John Brunner's 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider.[153][154]
  8. ^ Gibson wrote the following in the "Author's Afterword" of Mona Lisa Overdrive, dated July 16, 1992.

    Neuromancer was written on a "clockwork typewriter," the very one you may recall glimpsing in Julie Deane's office in Chiba City. This machine, a Hermes 2000 manual portable, dates from somewhere in the 1930s. It's a very tough and elegant piece of work, from the factory of E. PAILLARD & Cie S.A. YVERDON (SUISSE). Cased, it weighs slightly less than the Macintosh SE/30 I now write on, and is finished in a curious green- and-black "crackle" paint-job, perhaps meant to suggest the covers of an accountant's ledger. Its keys are green as well, of celluloid, and the letters and symbols on them are canary yellow. (I once happened to brush the shift-key with the tip of a lit cigarette, dramatically confirming the extreme flammability of this early plastic.) In its day, the Hermes 2000 was one of the best portable writing-machines in the world, and one of the most expensive. This one belonged to my wife's step-grandfather, who had been a journalist of sorts and had used it to compose laudatory essays on the poetry of Robert Burns. I used it first to write undergraduate Eng. lit. papers, then my early attempts at short stories, then Neuromancer, all without so much as ever having touched an actual computer.

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Further reading

External links
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Gibson&oldid=1216804882"