William Gibson
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William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian
After expanding on the story in Neuromancer with two more novels (
In the 1990s, Gibson composed the
In 1999,
Early life
Childhood, itinerance, and adolescence
William Ford Gibson was born in the coastal city of
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.
A shy, ungainly teenager, Gibson grew up in a monoculture he found "highly problematic",
Draft-dodging, exile, and counterculture
After his mother's death when he was 18, 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.
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
Early writing and the evolution of cyberpunk
After considering pursuing a master's degree on the topic of
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
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,
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
Sprawl trilogy, The Difference Engine, and Bridge trilogy
Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained rooted in Neuromancer, his work continued to evolve conceptually and stylistically.
The Sprawl trilogy was followed by the 1990 novel
Gibson's second series, the "
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.
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Gibson's prose has been analyzed by a number of scholars, including a dedicated 2011 book,
Gibson's work has received international attention
Cultural significance
William Gibson – the man who made us cool.
—cyberpunk author
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]
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
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
Visionary influence and prescience
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]
Observers contend that Gibson's influence on the development of the Web reached beyond prediction; he is widely credited with creating an
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
In his
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
Selected works
Novels
Adapted screenplays
|
Short stories
Nonfiction
|
Media appearances
- No Maps for These Territories (2000)[169]
- Making of 'Johnny Mnemonic' (1995)[170]
- Cyberpunk (1990)[171]
- Wild Palms (1993)
- Upload (2023)
Explanatory notes
- ^ 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]
- ^ 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]
- ^ Gibson later successfully resisted attempts by Autodesk to copyright the word for their abortive foray into virtual reality.[43]
- ^ Several track names on Hamm's Kings of Sleep album ("Black Ice", "Count Zero", "Kings of Sleep") reference Gibson's work.[136]
- ^ 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]
- ^ Zevon's 1989 album Transverse City was inspired by Gibson's fiction.[138]
- ^ 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.
References
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- ^ a b
"Gibson, William" Archived December 7, 2010, at the Locus Publications. Retrieved April 12, 2013.
- ^ "Inkpot Award". December 6, 2012. Archived from the original on January 29, 2017. Retrieved October 23, 2020.
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- ^ Schactman, Noah (May 23, 2008). "26 Years After Gibson, Pentagon Defines 'Cyberspace'". Wired. Archived from the original on September 14, 2008. Retrieved September 15, 2008.
- Sydney Morning Herald. Fairfax Media. Archivedfrom the original on September 11, 2007. Retrieved January 21, 2008.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Gibson, William (November 6, 2002). "Since 1948". Archived from the original on November 20, 2007. Retrieved November 4, 2007.
- ^ a b c d e f Adams, Tim; Emily Stokes; James Flint (August 12, 2007). "Space to think". The Observer. London. Archived from the original on October 16, 2007. Retrieved October 26, 2007.
- ^ a b c d e f g Rapatzikou, Tatiani (June 17, 2003). "William Gibson". The Literary Encyclopedia. The Literary Dictionary Company. Archived from the original on October 10, 2007. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
- ^ a b c d e f
Sale, Jonathan (June 19, 2003). "Passed/Failed: William Gibson, novelist and scriptwriter". Independent News & Media. Retrieved March 12, 2009.[dead link]
- ^ a b c Solomon, Deborah (August 19, 2007). "Questions for William Gibson: Back From the Future". The New York Times Magazine. p. 13. Archived from the original on May 12, 2013. Retrieved October 13, 2007.
- ^ Maddox, Tom (1989). "Maddox on Gibson". Archived from the original on October 13, 2007. Retrieved October 26, 2007.
This story originally appeared in a Canadian 'zine, Virus 23, 1989.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Mark Neale (director), William Gibson (subject) (2000). No Maps for These Territories (Documentary). Docurama.
- ^ a b Gibson, William (November 12, 2008). "Sci-fi special: William Gibson". New Scientist. Archived from the original on November 21, 2008. Retrieved November 17, 2008.
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- ^ from the original on January 25, 2012. Retrieved November 5, 2007.
- ^ a b Marshall, John (February 6, 2003). "William Gibson's new novel asks, is the truth stranger than science fiction today?". Books. Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Archived from the original on April 19, 2021. Retrieved November 3, 2007.
- ^ The Vancouver Sun. Archived from the originalon October 22, 2012. Retrieved March 4, 2017.
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- ^ "William Gibson". Desert Island Discs. November 19, 1999. Event occurs at 16:41. BBC. BBC Radio 4. Archived from the original on April 30, 2011. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
"For a couple of weeks I was essentially homeless, although it was such a delightful, floating, pleasant period that it now seems strange to me to think that I was in fact homeless. I was eventually, well, actually in quite short order taken on as the manager of Toronto's first head shop.
- ^ Yorkville: Hippie haven (14 min Windows Media Video; "This is Bill" appears first after 0:45). September 4, 1967. Rochdale College: Organized anarchy (16 min radio recording Windows Media Audio; interviews start after 4:11). Yorkville, Toronto: CBC.ca. Retrieved February 1, 2008.
- ^ Gibson, William (May 1, 2003). "That CBC Archival Footage". Archived from the original on December 10, 2007. Retrieved November 26, 2007.
- ^ Poole, Steven (May 3, 2003). "Profile: William Gibson". guardian.co.uk. London. Archived from the original on January 25, 2014. Retrieved April 27, 2010.
- ^ a b Gibson, William (January 1999). "My Obsession". Wired.com. Vol. 7, no. 1. Archived from the original on May 13, 2008. Retrieved December 2, 2007.
- ^ Rogers, Mike (October 1, 1993). "In Same Universe". Lysator Sweden Science Fiction Archive. Archived from the original on April 19, 2007. Retrieved November 6, 2007.
- ^ "UBC Alumni: The First Cyberpunk". UBC Reports. 50 (3). March 4, 2004. Archived from the original on January 8, 2008. Retrieved November 2, 2007.
- ^ a b Parker, T. Virgil (Summer 2007). "William Gibson: Sci-Fi Icon Becomes Prophet of the Present". College Crier. 6 (2). Archived from the original on October 9, 2007. Retrieved October 14, 2007.
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- ^ a b William Gibson at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB). Retrieved April 13, 2013.
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- ^ Gibson, William (September 4, 2003). "Neuromancer: The Timeline". Archived from the original on December 30, 2006. Retrieved November 26, 2007.
- ^ Gibson, William (January 17, 2003). "Oh Well, While I'm Here: Bladerunner". Archived from the original on September 26, 2007. Retrieved January 21, 2008.
- ^ a b c Hollinger, Veronica (July 1999). "Contemporary Trends in Science Fiction Criticism, 1980–1999". Science Fiction Studies. 26 (78). Archived from the original on October 22, 2007. Retrieved November 6, 2007.
- ^ Cheng, Alastair. "77. Neuromancer (1984)". The LRC 100: Canada's Most Important Books. Literary Review of Canada. Archived from the original on October 29, 2007. Retrieved September 9, 2007.
- ^ Person, Lawrence (Winter–Spring 1998). "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto". Nova Express. 4 (4). Archived from the original on April 26, 2009. Retrieved November 6, 2007.
- ^ Grossman, Lev (October 16, 2005). "Neuromancer (1984)". TIME Magazine All-Time 100 Novels. Time. Archived from the original on October 22, 2011. Retrieved November 6, 2007.
- ^ a b van Bakel, Rogier (June 1995). "Remembering Johnny". Wired. Vol. 3, no. 6. Archived from the original on May 16, 2008. Retrieved January 10, 2008.
- ^ a b c Johnston, Antony (August 1999). "William Gibson : All Tomorrow's Parties : Waiting For The Man". Spike Magazine. Archived from the original on June 8, 2007. Retrieved October 14, 2007.
- ^ Gibson, William (August 15, 2005). "The Log of the Mustang Sally". Archived from the original on February 8, 2008. Retrieved January 21, 2008.
- ^ a b c d Bolhafner, J. Stephen (March 1994). "William Gibson interview". Starlog (200): 72. Archived from the original on July 8, 2011. Retrieved July 14, 2009.
- ^ "1986 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Archived from the original on April 11, 2016. Retrieved April 30, 2009.
- ^ "1987 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Archived from the original on February 25, 2012. Retrieved April 30, 2009.
- ^ "1989 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Archived from the original on February 20, 2017. Retrieved April 30, 2009.
- ^ Bebergal, Peter (August 26, 2007). "The age of steampunk". The Boston Globe. p. 3. Archived from the original on September 4, 2007. Retrieved October 14, 2007.
- ^ Walter, Damien G (January 7, 2009). "Steampunk: the future of the past". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on April 7, 2019. Retrieved January 11, 2009.
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[Gibson's work] has attracted an audience from outside, people who read it as a poetic evocation of life in the late eighties rather than as science fiction.
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Although author William Gibson came up with the concept of virtual sex, he does not want any parts of it, thank you very much. Not that he's a prude, mind you. Rather, like most things, the reality does not approach the perfection of the fantasy.
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Further reading
- Olsen, Lance (1992). William Gibson. San Bernardino: Borgo Press. OCLC 27254726.
- Cavallaro, Dani (2000). Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. London: Athlone Press. OCLC 43751735.
- OCLC 63125607.
- Yoke, Carl B.; Robinson, Carol, eds. (2007). The Cultural Influences of William Gibson, the "Father" of Cyberpunk Science Fiction. OCLC 173809083.
External links
- Official website
- Bibliography from the Centre for Language and Literature, Athabasca University
- William Gibson at IMDb
- William Gibson at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (including bibliography of selected interviews)
- William Gibson aleph – an extensive site dedicated to the author and his works (last updated Nov 2010)
- David Wallace-Wells (Summer 2011). "William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211". The Paris Review. Summer 2011 (197).
- "William Gibson biography". Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.