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Wikipedia

William Gibson

December 03, 2023

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

William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"[4]—and helped to create an iconography for the 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.

William Gibson
Gibson in 2008
BornWilliam Ford Gibson
(1948-03-17) March 17, 1948 (age 75)[1]
Conway, South Carolina, U.S.
OccupationNovelist
NationalityAmerican, Canadian[citation needed]
Alma materUniversity of British Columbia
Period1977–present
GenreSpeculative fiction, science fiction
Literary movementCyberpunk, steampunk, postcyberpunk
Notable worksNeuromancer (novel, 1984)
Notable awardsNebula, Hugo, Philip K. Dick, Ditmar, Seiun (all 1985); Prix Aurora (1995),[2] Inkpot (2016)[3]
Website
williamgibsonbooks.com

After expanding on the story in Neuromancer with two more novels (Count Zero in 1986 and Mona Lisa Overdrive in 1988), thus completing the 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 Bridge trilogy of novels, which explored the sociological developments of near-future urban environments, 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, The Guardian described Gibson as "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades", while The Sydney Morning Herald called him the "noir prophet" of cyberpunk.[6] Throughout his career, Gibson has written more than 20 short stories and 12 critically acclaimed novels (one in collaboration), contributed articles to several major publications, and collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers, and musicians. His work has been cited as influencing a variety of disciplines: academia, design, film, literature, music, cyberculture, and technology.

Early life edit

 
William S. Burroughs at his 70th birthday party in 1984. Burroughs, more than any other beat generation writer, was an important influence on the adolescent Gibson.

Childhood, itinerance, and adolescence edit

William Ford Gibson was born in the coastal city of Conway, South Carolina, and he spent most of his childhood in Wytheville, Virginia, a small town in the 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.[8][13] 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",[13] with the subsequent feeling of abrupt exile.[7] At the age of 12, Gibson "wanted nothing more than to be a science fiction writer".[14] He spent a few unproductive years at basketball-obsessed George Wythe High School, a time spent largely in his room listening to records and reading books.[10] At 13, unbeknownst to his mother, he purchased an anthology of 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",[14] consciously rejected religion and took refuge in reading science fiction as well as writers such as Burroughs and Henry Miller.[13][17] Becoming frustrated with his poor academic performance, Gibson's mother threatened to send him to a boarding school; to her surprise, he reacted enthusiastically.[10] Unable to afford his preferred choice of Southern California, his then "chronically anxious and 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 edit

 
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,[10] Gibson left school without graduating and became very isolated for a long time, traveling to California and Europe, and immersing himself in the counterculture.[8][13][17] In 1967, he elected to move to Canada in order "to avoid the Vietnam war draft".[7][13] At his draft hearing, he honestly informed interviewers that his intention in life was to sample every narcotic substance in existence.[19] Gibson has observed that he "did not literally evade the draft, as they never bothered drafting me";[7] after the hearing he went home, purchased a bus ticket to Toronto, and left a week or two later.[13] In the biographical documentary No Maps for These Territories (2000), Gibson said that his decision was motivated less by 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[20]

After weeks of nominal homelessness, Gibson was hired as the manager of Toronto's first head shop, a retailer of drug paraphernalia.[21] 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,[22] for which he was paid $500—the equivalent of 20 weeks' rent—which financed his later travels.[23] Gibson spent a "brief, riot-torn spell" in the District of Columbia 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,[24] 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,[25] as they "couldn't afford to stay anywhere that had anything remotely like hard currency".[26]

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 artifacts he would then up-market to specialist dealers.[25] Realizing that it was easier to sustain high college grades, and thus qualify for generous student financial aid, than to work,[16] he enrolled at the University of British Columbia (UBC), earning "a desultory bachelor's degree in English"[7] in 1977.[27] 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.[28] It was at UBC that he attended his first course on science fiction, taught by 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 edit

After considering pursuing a master's degree on the topic of hard science fiction novels as fascist literature,[16] Gibson discontinued writing in the year that followed graduation and, as one critic put it, expanded his collection of punk records.[29] 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.[30] The two became immediate and lifelong friends. Shirley persuaded Gibson to sell his early short stories and to take writing seriously.[29][30]

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][31] 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".[31] 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."[31] Sterling, Shiner, Shirley and Gibson, along with Rudy Rucker, went on to form the core of the radical cyberpunk literary movement.[32]

Literary career edit

Early short fiction edit

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][33] 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."[34]

Beginning in 1981,[33] 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.[30] 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.[30]

Neuromancer edit

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 exclusively feature debut novels. Given a year to complete the work,[35] 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."[36] 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,[37] quickly becoming an underground word-of-mouth hit.[30] It became the first winner of one science fiction "triple crown"[16] —both Nebula and Hugo Awards as the year's best novel and Philip K. Dick Award as the best paperback original[2]— eventually selling more than 6.5 million copies worldwide.[38]

Lawrence Person in his "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto" (1998) identified Neuromancer as "the archetypal cyberpunk work".[39]

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."[40]

Literary critic Larry McCaffery described the concept of the matrix in Neuromancer as a place 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."[16] A 52-year-old Gibson later commented on himself as an author, circa Neuromancer, 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".[13] The success of Neuromancer nonetheless led to the 35-year-old Gibson's emergence from obscurity.[41]

Sprawl trilogy, The Difference Engine, and Bridge trilogy edit

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.[42] He next intended to write an unrelated postmodern space opera, titled The Log of the Mustang Sally, but reneged on the contract with Arbor House after a falling out over the dustjacket art of their hardcover of Count Zero.[43] 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][30] 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,[44] with both later novels also earning Nebula and Hugo Award and Locus SF Award nominations.[45][46][47]

The Sprawl trilogy was followed by the 1990 novel The Difference Engine, an alternative 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 its success drew attention to the nascent steampunk literary genre of which it remains the best-known work.[48][49]

Gibson's second series, the "Bridge trilogy", is composed of Virtual Light (1993), a "darkly comic urban detective story",[50] Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999). The first and third books in the trilogy center on San Francisco in the near future; all three explore Gibson's recurring themes of technological, physical, and spiritual transcendence in a more grounded, matter-of-fact style than his first trilogy.[51] Salon's Andrew Leonard notes that in the Bridge trilogy, Gibson's villains change from multinational corporations and artificial intelligences of the Sprawl trilogy to the mass media – namely tabloid television and the cult of celebrity.[52] 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.[53] Leonard's review called Idoru a "return to form" for Gibson,[54] while critic Steven Poole asserted that All Tomorrow's Parties marked his development from "science-fiction hotshot to wry sociologist of the near future."[55]

Blue Ant edit

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."[56] 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".[57] 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"[58] — and put Gibson's work on to mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.[59] 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."[60] However, "Blue Ant" rather than "Bigend" has become the standard signifier.[61][62] At a later date, Gibson stated that he did not name his trilogies, "I wait to see what people call them,"[63] and has in 2016 used "the Blue Ant books" in a tweet.[64]

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.[65] 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.[66] Critic John Sutherland characterized this phenomenon as threatening "to completely overhaul the way literary criticism is conducted".[67]

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."[68] He saw the attacks as a nodal point in history, "an experience out of culture",[69] and "in some ways ... the true beginning of the 21st century."[70] 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",[71][72] became a prominent theme of Gibson's work,[73] while his focus nevertheless remained "at the intersection of paranoia and technology".[74]

The Jackpot trilogy and graphic novels edit

The Peripheral, the first in a new series of novels by William Gibson, was released on October 28, 2014.[75] 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."[76] The story takes place in two eras, one about thirty years into the future and the other further in the future.[77]

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)."[78] The next year, Dark Horse Comics began releasing Johnnie Christmas' adaptation of Gibson's Alien 3 script in five parts,[79] resulting in a hardcover collection being published in 2019.[80]

The Peripheral's continuation, Agency, was released on January 21, 2020, after being delayed from an initial announced release date of December 2018.[81] 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.[82] The working title for the third novel in the series was Jackpot,[83] 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."[84]

Collaborations, adaptations, and miscellanea edit

 
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 edit

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,[65] and "Dogfight" (1985) with Michael Swanwick. Gibson had previously written the foreword to Shirley's 1980 novel City Come A-walkin'[85] and the pair's collaboration continued when Gibson wrote the introduction to Shirley's short story collection Heatseeker (1989).[86] 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.[87]

Gibson and Sterling collaborated again on the short story "The Angel of Goliad" in 1990,[86] which they soon expanded into the novel-length alternate history story The Difference Engine (1990). The two were later "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"[87]), in which they argued against the digital divide[88] and "appalled everyone" by proposing that all schools be put online, with education taking place over the Internet.[89] 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 because he was not creatively free at the time.[56]

In 1993, Gibson contributed lyrics and featured as a guest vocalist on Yellow Magic Orchestra's Technodon album,[90][91] and wrote lyrics to the track "Dog Star Girl" for Deborah Harry's Debravation.[92]

Film adaptations, screenplays, and appearances edit

Gibson was first solicited to work as a screenwriter after a film producer discovered a waterlogged copy of Neuromancer on a beach at a Thai resort.[93] His early efforts to write film scripts failed to manifest themselves as finished product; "Burning Chrome" (which was to be directed by Kathryn Bigelow) and "Neuro-Hotel" were two attempts by the author at film adaptations that were never made.[87] In the late 1980s he wrote an early version of Alien 3 (which he later characterized as "Tarkovskian"), few elements of which survived in the final version.[87] In 2018-19, Dark Horse Comics released a five-part adaptation of Gibson's Alien 3 script, illustrated and adapted by Johnnie Christmas. In 2019, Audible released an audio drama of Gibson's script, adapted by Dirk Maggs and with Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen reprising their roles.[94]

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 Rashid Nugmanov after an American producer had expressed an interest in a Soviet-American collaboration to star Soviet rock musician Viktor Tsoi.[95] 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 that ended with Tsoi's death in a car crash, 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.[95] A similar fate befell Gibson's collaboration with Japanese filmmaker Sogo Ishii in 1991,[30] a film they planned on shooting in the Walled City of Kowloon until the city was demolished in 1993.[96]

 
Aside from his short stories and novels, Gibson has written several film screenplays and 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 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.[53] As of 2013, Vincenzo Natali still hoped to bring Neuromancer to the screen, after some years in development hell.[97] 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.[98] An anime adaptation of Idoru was announced as in development in 2006,[99] and Pattern Recognition was in the process of development by director Peter Weir, although according to Gibson the latter is no longer attached to the project.[100] Announced at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2015 is an adaptation of Gibson's short story Dogfight by 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.[101]

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.[42][102] 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.[103] Director Oliver Stone had borrowed heavily from Gibson's novels to make the series,[50] and in the aftermath of its cancellation Gibson contributed an article, "Where The Holograms Go", to the Wild Palms Reader.[103] 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.[104] 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 edit

 
Gibson has often collaborated with performance artists such as theatre group La Fura dels Baus, here performing at the 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[41] 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.[90] 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.[105]

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.[106] 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.[107] The architects exhibit featured Gibson on a monitor discussing the future and reading from "Skinner's Room".[90] 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".[107] A slightly different version of the short story was featured a year later in Omni.[108]

Cryptography edit

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.[109] 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."[110] 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 bulletin board the next day; this is the text that circulated widely on the Internet.[111]

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"[112] 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",[113] which enlisted participants to solve the intentional scrambling of the poem in exchange for prizes.[114] The code was successfully cracked by Robert Xiao in late July 2012.[113]

Essays and short-form nonfiction edit

Gibson is a sporadic contributor of non-fiction articles to newspapers and journals. He has occasionally contributed longer-form articles to Wired and of op-eds to The New York Times, and has written for The Observer, Addicted to Noise, New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and 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.[115][116] 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.[117][118]

 
William Gibson in Bloomsbury, London in September 2007. His fiction is hailed by critics for its characterization of late capitalism, postindustrial society and the portents of the 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.[119] The blog was largely discontinued by July 2009, after the writer had undertaken prolific microblogging on Twitter under the nom de plume "GreatDismal".[120] In 2012, Gibson released a collection of his non-fiction works entitled Distrust That Particular Flavor.[121]

Influence and recognition edit

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, William Gibson: A Literary Companion.[122] Hailed by Steven Poole of The Guardian in 1999 as "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades" in terms of influence,[55] 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 unprecedented 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".[53] Neuromancer gained unprecedented critical and popular attention outside science fiction,[16] as an "evocation of life in the late 1980s",[123] 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[9] from an audience that was not limited to 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."[124] 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",[125] and as a narrative version of postmodern consumer culture.[126] It is praised by critics for its depictions of late capitalism[125] and its "rewriting of subjectivity, human consciousness and behaviour made newly problematic by technology."[126] Tatiani Rapatzikou, writing in The Literary Encyclopedia, identifies Gibson as "one of North America's most highly acclaimed science fiction writers".[9]

Cultural significance edit

William Gibson – the man who made us cool.

—cyberpunk author Richard K Morgan[127]

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.[37] 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.[128] The publication of Neuromancer (1984) hit a cultural nerve,[37] 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."[30][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".[129]

 
Gibson (left) influenced cyberpunk[127] and postcyberpunk writers such as Cory Doctorow (right),[130] whom he also consulted for technical advice while writing Spook Country.[131]

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 cyberspace, netsurfing, ICE, jacking in, and neural implants entered popular usage, as did concepts such as net consciousness, virtual interaction and "the matrix".[132] In "Burning Chrome" (1982), he coined the term cyberspace,[c][133] referring to the "mass consensual hallucination" of computer networks.[134] 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.[135] Artist Dike Blair has commented that Gibson's "terse descriptive phrases capture the moods which surround technologies, rather than their engineering."[136]

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)[140] and Sonic Youth. U2's Zooropa album was heavily influenced by Neuromancer,[44] 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.[141] He returned the favour by writing an article about the band's Vertigo Tour for Wired in August 2005.[142] The band Zeromancer take their name from Neuromancer.[143]

The film The Matrix (1999) drew inspiration for its title, characters and story elements from the Sprawl trilogy.[144] The characters of Neo and Trinity in The Matrix are similar to Bobby Newmark (Count Zero) and Molly ("Johnny Mnemonic", Neuromancer).[98] 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.[98] Critics have identified marked similarities between Neuromancer and the film's cinematography and tone.[145] In spite of his initial reticence about seeing the film on its release,[13] Gibson later described it as "arguably the ultimate 'cyberpunk' artifact."[146] In 2008 he received honorary doctorates from Simon Fraser University and Coastal Carolina University.[147] He was inducted by Science Fiction Hall of Fame that same year,[148] presented by his close friend and collaborator Jack Womack.

Visionary influence and prescience edit

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

—William Gibson[149][150]

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.[151][152][153] Gibson thereby imagined a worldwide communications network years before the origin of the World Wide Web,[42] 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,[89] and in 2000 predicted it would lead to the death of the nation state.[13]

 
Gibson is renowned for his visionary influence on—and predictive attunement to—technology, design, urban sociology and 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 iconography for the information age, long before the embrace of the Internet by the mainstream.[19] Gibson introduced, in Neuromancer, the notion of the "meatpuppet", and is credited with inventing—conceptually rather than participatorally—the phenomenon of virtual sex.[157] His influence on early pioneers of desktop environment digital art has been acknowledged,[158] and he holds an honorary doctorate from 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".[55] 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 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.[162] Not all responses to Gibson's visions have been positive, however; virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce, though acknowledging their heavy influence on him and that "no other writer had so eloquently and emotionally affected the direction of the hacker community,"[163] dismissed them as "adolescent fantasies of violence and disembodiment."[164] 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 disputed the notion that the creators of lonelygirl15 drew influence from him.[165] Another phenomenon anticipated by Gibson is the rise of reality television,[28] for example in Virtual Light, which featured a satirical extrapolated version of 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[72]

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".[53][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.[89] 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'."[58]

Selected works edit

Main article: List of works by William Gibson

Media appearances edit

Explanatory notes edit

  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.[156]
  3. ^ Gibson later successfully resisted attempts by Autodesk to copyright the word for their abortive foray into virtual reality.[44]
  4. ^ Several track names on Hamm's Kings of Sleep album ("Black Ice", "Count Zero", "Kings of Sleep") reference Gibson's work.[137]
  5. ^ Idol released an album in 1993 titled Cyberpunk, which featured a track named Neuromancer.[44] Robert Christgau excoriated Idol's treatment of cyberpunk,[138] and Gibson later stated that Idol had "turned it into something very silly."[87]
  6. ^ Zevon's 1989 album Transverse City was inspired by Gibson's fiction.[139]
  7. ^ Both the Internet with its dramatic social effects and the cyberpunk genre itself were also anticipated in John Brunner's 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider.[154][155]
  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.

References edit

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Further reading edit

External links edit

December 03, 2023
william, gibson, other, people, named, disambiguation, gibsonian, redirects, here, school, psychology, gibsonian, psychology, william, ford, gibson, born, march, 1948, american, canadian, speculative, fiction, writer, essayist, widely, credited, with, pioneeri. For other people named William Gibson see William Gibson disambiguation Gibsonian redirects here For the school of psychology see Gibsonian psychology William Ford Gibson born March 17 1948 is an American Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s his early works were noir near future stories that explored the effects of technology cybernetics and computer networks on humans a combination of lowlife and high tech 4 and helped to create an iconography for the 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 William GibsonGibson in 2008BornWilliam Ford Gibson 1948 03 17 March 17 1948 age 75 1 Conway South Carolina U S OccupationNovelistNationalityAmerican Canadian citation needed Alma materUniversity of British ColumbiaPeriod1977 presentGenreSpeculative fiction science fictionLiterary movementCyberpunk steampunk postcyberpunkNotable worksNeuromancer novel 1984 Notable awardsNebula Hugo Philip K Dick Ditmar Seiun all 1985 Prix Aurora 1995 2 Inkpot 2016 3 Websitewilliamgibsonbooks wbr comAfter expanding on the story in Neuromancer with two more novels Count Zero in 1986 and Mona Lisa Overdrive in 1988 thus completing the 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 Bridge trilogy of novels which explored the sociological developments of near future urban environments 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 The Guardian described Gibson as probably the most important novelist of the past two decades while The Sydney Morning Herald called him the noir prophet of cyberpunk 6 Throughout his career Gibson has written more than 20 short stories and 12 critically acclaimed novels one in collaboration contributed articles to several major publications and collaborated extensively with performance artists filmmakers and musicians His work has been cited as influencing a variety of disciplines academia design film literature music cyberculture and technology Contents 1 Early life 1 1 Childhood itinerance and adolescence 1 2 Draft dodging exile and counterculture 1 3 Early writing and the evolution of cyberpunk 2 Literary career 2 1 Early short fiction 2 2 Neuromancer 2 3 Sprawl trilogy The Difference Engine and Bridge trilogy 2 4 Blue Ant 2 5 The Jackpot trilogy and graphic novels 3 Collaborations adaptations and miscellanea 3 1 Literary collaborations 3 2 Film adaptations screenplays and appearances 3 3 Exhibitions poetry and performance art 3 4 Cryptography 3 5 Essays and short form nonfiction 4 Influence and recognition 4 1 Cultural significance 4 2 Visionary influence and prescience 5 Selected works 6 Media appearances 7 Explanatory notes 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External linksEarly life edit nbsp William S Burroughs at his 70th birthday party in 1984 Burroughs more than any other beat generation writer was an important influence on the adolescent Gibson Childhood itinerance and adolescence edit William Ford Gibson was born in the coastal city of Conway South Carolina and he spent most of his childhood in Wytheville Virginia a small town in the 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 8 13 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 13 with the subsequent feeling of abrupt exile 7 At the age of 12 Gibson wanted nothing more than to be a science fiction writer 14 He spent a few unproductive years at basketball obsessed George Wythe High School a time spent largely in his room listening to records and reading books 10 At 13 unbeknownst to his mother he purchased an anthology of 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 14 consciously rejected religion and took refuge in reading science fiction as well as writers such as Burroughs and Henry Miller 13 17 Becoming frustrated with his poor academic performance Gibson s mother threatened to send him to a boarding school to her surprise he reacted enthusiastically 10 Unable to afford his preferred choice of Southern California his then chronically anxious and 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 edit nbsp 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 10 Gibson left school without graduating and became very isolated for a long time traveling to California and Europe and immersing himself in the counterculture 8 13 17 In 1967 he elected to move to Canada in order to avoid the Vietnam war draft 7 13 At his draft hearing he honestly informed interviewers that his intention in life was to sample every narcotic substance in existence 19 Gibson has observed that he did not literally evade the draft as they never bothered drafting me 7 after the hearing he went home purchased a bus ticket to Toronto and left a week or two later 13 In the biographical documentary No Maps for These Territories 2000 Gibson said that his decision was motivated less by 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 20 After weeks of nominal homelessness Gibson was hired as the manager of Toronto s first head shop a retailer of drug paraphernalia 21 He found the city s emigre 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 22 for which he was paid 500 the equivalent of 20 weeks rent which financed his later travels 23 Gibson spent a brief riot torn spell in the District of Columbia 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 24 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 25 as they couldn t afford to stay anywhere that had anything remotely like hard currency 26 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 artifacts he would then up market to specialist dealers 25 Realizing that it was easier to sustain high college grades and thus qualify for generous student financial aid than to work 16 he enrolled at the University of British Columbia UBC earning a desultory bachelor s degree in English 7 in 1977 27 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 28 It was at UBC that he attended his first course on science fiction taught by 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 edit After considering pursuing a master s degree on the topic of hard science fiction novels as fascist literature 16 Gibson discontinued writing in the year that followed graduation and as one critic put it expanded his collection of punk records 29 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 30 The two became immediate and lifelong friends Shirley persuaded Gibson to sell his early short stories and to take writing seriously 29 30 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 31 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 31 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 31 Sterling Shiner Shirley and Gibson along with Rudy Rucker went on to form the core of the radical cyberpunk literary movement 32 Literary career editEarly short fiction edit 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 33 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 34 Beginning in 1981 33 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 30 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 30 Neuromancer edit 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 exclusively feature debut novels Given a year to complete the work 35 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 36 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 37 quickly becoming an underground word of mouth hit 30 It became the first winner of one science fiction triple crown 16 both Nebula and Hugo Awards as the year s best novel and Philip K Dick Award as the best paperback original 2 eventually selling more than 6 5 million copies worldwide 38 Lawrence Person in his Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto 1998 identified Neuromancer as the archetypal cyberpunk work 39 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 40 Literary critic Larry McCaffery described the concept of the matrix in Neuromancer as a place 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 16 A 52 year old Gibson later commented on himself as an author circa Neuromancer 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 13 The success of Neuromancer nonetheless led to the 35 year old Gibson s emergence from obscurity 41 Sprawl trilogy The Difference Engine and Bridge trilogy edit Main articles Sprawl trilogy The Difference Engine and Bridge trilogy nbsp The San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge a fictional squatted version of which constitutes the setting for Gibson s Bridge trilogyAlthough much of Gibson s reputation has remained rooted in Neuromancer his work continued to evolve conceptually and stylistically 42 He next intended to write an unrelated postmodern space opera titled The Log of the Mustang Sally but reneged on the contract with Arbor House after a falling out over the dustjacket art of their hardcover of Count Zero 43 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 30 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 44 with both later novels also earning Nebula and Hugo Award and Locus SF Award nominations 45 46 47 The Sprawl trilogy was followed by the 1990 novel The Difference Engine an alternative 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 its success drew attention to the nascent steampunk literary genre of which it remains the best known work 48 49 Gibson s second series the Bridge trilogy is composed of Virtual Light 1993 a darkly comic urban detective story 50 Idoru 1996 and All Tomorrow s Parties 1999 The first and third books in the trilogy center on San Francisco in the near future all three explore Gibson s recurring themes of technological physical and spiritual transcendence in a more grounded matter of fact style than his first trilogy 51 Salon s Andrew Leonard notes that in the Bridge trilogy Gibson s villains change from multinational corporations and artificial intelligences of the Sprawl trilogy to the mass media namely tabloid television and the cult of celebrity 52 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 53 Leonard s review called Idoru a return to form for Gibson 54 while critic Steven Poole asserted that All Tomorrow s Parties marked his development from science fiction hotshot to wry sociologist of the near future 55 Blue Ant edit 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 56 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 57 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 58 and put Gibson s work on to mainstream bestseller lists for the first time 59 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 nbsp Gibson signing one of his novels in 2010When 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 60 However Blue Ant rather than Bigend has become the standard signifier 61 62 At a later date Gibson stated that he did not name his trilogies I wait to see what people call them 63 and has in 2016 used the Blue Ant books in a tweet 64 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 65 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 66 Critic John Sutherland characterized this phenomenon as threatening to completely overhaul the way literary criticism is conducted 67 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 68 He saw the attacks as a nodal point in history an experience out of culture 69 and in some ways the true beginning of the 21st century 70 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 71 72 became a prominent theme of Gibson s work 73 while his focus nevertheless remained at the intersection of paranoia and technology 74 The Jackpot trilogy and graphic novels edit The Peripheral the first in a new series of novels by William Gibson was released on October 28 2014 75 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 76 The story takes place in two eras one about thirty years into the future and the other further in the future 77 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 78 The next year Dark Horse Comics began releasing Johnnie Christmas adaptation of Gibson s Alien 3 script in five parts 79 resulting in a hardcover collection being published in 2019 80 The Peripheral s continuation Agency was released on January 21 2020 after being delayed from an initial announced release date of December 2018 81 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 82 The working title for the third novel in the series was Jackpot 83 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 84 Collaborations adaptations and miscellanea edit nbsp Bruce Sterling co author with Gibson of the short story Red Star Winter Orbit 1983 and the 1990 steampunk novel The Difference EngineLiterary collaborations edit 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 65 and Dogfight 1985 with Michael Swanwick Gibson had previously written the foreword to Shirley s 1980 novel City Come A walkin 85 and the pair s collaboration continued when Gibson wrote the introduction to Shirley s short story collection Heatseeker 1989 86 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 87 Gibson and Sterling collaborated again on the short story The Angel of Goliad in 1990 86 which they soon expanded into the novel length alternate history story The Difference Engine 1990 The two were later 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 87 in which they argued against the digital divide 88 and appalled everyone by proposing that all schools be put online with education taking place over the Internet 89 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 because he was not creatively free at the time 56 In 1993 Gibson contributed lyrics and featured as a guest vocalist on Yellow Magic Orchestra s Technodon album 90 91 and wrote lyrics to the track Dog Star Girl for Deborah Harry s Debravation 92 Film adaptations screenplays and appearances edit Gibson was first solicited to work as a screenwriter after a film producer discovered a waterlogged copy of Neuromancer on a beach at a Thai resort 93 His early efforts to write film scripts failed to manifest themselves as finished product Burning Chrome which was to be directed by Kathryn Bigelow and Neuro Hotel were two attempts by the author at film adaptations that were never made 87 In the late 1980s he wrote an early version of Alien 3 which he later characterized as Tarkovskian few elements of which survived in the final version 87 In 2018 19 Dark Horse Comics released a five part adaptation of Gibson s Alien 3 script illustrated and adapted by Johnnie Christmas In 2019 Audible released an audio drama of Gibson s script adapted by Dirk Maggs and with Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen reprising their roles 94 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 Rashid Nugmanov after an American producer had expressed an interest in a Soviet American collaboration to star Soviet rock musician Viktor Tsoi 95 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 that ended with Tsoi s death in a car crash 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 95 A similar fate befell Gibson s collaboration with Japanese filmmaker Sogo Ishii in 1991 30 a film they planned on shooting in the Walled City of Kowloon until the city was demolished in 1993 96 nbsp Aside from his short stories and novels Gibson has written several film screenplays and 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 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 53 As of 2013 update Vincenzo Natali still hoped to bring Neuromancer to the screen after some years in development hell 97 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 98 An anime adaptation of Idoru was announced as in development in 2006 99 and Pattern Recognition was in the process of development by director Peter Weir although according to Gibson the latter is no longer attached to the project 100 Announced at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2015 is an adaptation of Gibson s short story Dogfight by 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 101 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 42 102 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 103 Director Oliver Stone had borrowed heavily from Gibson s novels to make the series 50 and in the aftermath of its cancellation Gibson contributed an article Where The Holograms Go to the Wild Palms Reader 103 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 104 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 edit nbsp Gibson has often collaborated with performance artists such as theatre group La Fura dels Baus here performing at the 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 41 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 90 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 105 In 1990 Gibson contributed to Visionary San Francisco an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shown from June 14 to August 26 106 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 107 The architects exhibit featured Gibson on a monitor discussing the future and reading from Skinner s Room 90 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 107 A slightly different version of the short story was featured a year later in Omni 108 Cryptography edit 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 109 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 110 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 bulletin board the next day this is the text that circulated widely on the Internet 111 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 112 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 113 which enlisted participants to solve the intentional scrambling of the poem in exchange for prizes 114 The code was successfully cracked by Robert Xiao in late July 2012 113 Essays and short form nonfiction edit Gibson is a sporadic contributor of non fiction articles to newspapers and journals He has occasionally contributed longer form articles to Wired and of op eds to The New York Times and has written for The Observer Addicted to Noise New York Times Magazine Rolling Stone and 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 115 116 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 117 118 nbsp William Gibson in Bloomsbury London in September 2007 His fiction is hailed by critics for its characterization of late capitalism postindustrial society and the portents of the 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 119 The blog was largely discontinued by July 2009 after the writer had undertaken prolific microblogging on Twitter under the nom de plume GreatDismal 120 In 2012 Gibson released a collection of his non fiction works entitled Distrust That Particular Flavor 121 Influence and recognition editSee 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 William Gibson A Literary Companion 122 Hailed by Steven Poole of The Guardian in 1999 as probably the most important novelist of the past two decades in terms of influence 55 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 unprecedented achievement described by the Mail amp Guardian as the sci fi writer s version of winning the Goncourt Booker and Pulitzer prizes in the same year 53 Neuromancer gained unprecedented critical and popular attention outside science fiction 16 as an evocation of life in the late 1980s 123 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 9 from an audience that was not limited to 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 124 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 125 and as a narrative version of postmodern consumer culture 126 It is praised by critics for its depictions of late capitalism 125 and its rewriting of subjectivity human consciousness and behaviour made newly problematic by technology 126 Tatiani Rapatzikou writing in The Literary Encyclopedia identifies Gibson as one of North America s most highly acclaimed science fiction writers 9 Cultural significance edit William Gibson the man who made us cool cyberpunk author Richard K Morgan 127 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 37 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 128 The publication of Neuromancer 1984 hit a cultural nerve 37 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 30 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 129 nbsp Gibson left influenced cyberpunk 127 and postcyberpunk writers such as Cory Doctorow right 130 whom he also consulted for technical advice while writing Spook Country 131 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 cyberspace netsurfing ICE jacking in and neural implants entered popular usage as did concepts such as net consciousness virtual interaction and the matrix 132 In Burning Chrome 1982 he coined the term cyberspace c 133 referring to the mass consensual hallucination of computer networks 134 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 135 Artist Dike Blair has commented that Gibson s terse descriptive phrases capture the moods which surround technologies rather than their engineering 136 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 140 and Sonic Youth U2 s Zooropa album was heavily influenced by Neuromancer 44 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 141 He returned the favour by writing an article about the band s Vertigo Tour for Wired in August 2005 142 The band Zeromancer take their name from Neuromancer 143 The film The Matrix 1999 drew inspiration for its title characters and story elements from the Sprawl trilogy 144 The characters of Neo and Trinity in The Matrix are similar to Bobby Newmark Count Zero and Molly Johnny Mnemonic Neuromancer 98 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 98 Critics have identified marked similarities between Neuromancer and the film s cinematography and tone 145 In spite of his initial reticence about seeing the film on its release 13 Gibson later described it as arguably the ultimate cyberpunk artifact 146 In 2008 he received honorary doctorates from Simon Fraser University and Coastal Carolina University 147 He was inducted by Science Fiction Hall of Fame that same year 148 presented by his close friend and collaborator Jack Womack Visionary influence and prescience edit The future is already here it s just not evenly distributed William Gibson 149 150 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 151 152 153 Gibson thereby imagined a worldwide communications network years before the origin of the World Wide Web 42 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 89 and in 2000 predicted it would lead to the death of the nation state 13 nbsp Gibson is renowned for his visionary influence on and predictive attunement to technology design urban sociology and 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 iconography for the information age long before the embrace of the Internet by the mainstream 19 Gibson introduced in Neuromancer the notion of the meatpuppet and is credited with inventing conceptually rather than participatorally the phenomenon of virtual sex 157 His influence on early pioneers of desktop environment digital art has been acknowledged 158 and he holds an honorary doctorate from 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 55 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 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 162 Not all responses to Gibson s visions have been positive however virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce though acknowledging their heavy influence on him and that no other writer had so eloquently and emotionally affected the direction of the hacker community 163 dismissed them as adolescent fantasies of violence and disembodiment 164 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 disputed the notion that the creators of lonelygirl15 drew influence from him 165 Another phenomenon anticipated by Gibson is the rise of reality television 28 for example in Virtual Light which featured a satirical extrapolated version of 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 72 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 53 167 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 89 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 58 Selected works editMain article List of works by William Gibson Novels Sprawl trilogy Neuromancer 1984 Count Zero 1986 Mona Lisa Overdrive 1988 The Difference Engine 1990 with Bruce Sterling Bridge trilogy Virtual Light 1993 Idoru 1996 All Tomorrow s Parties 1999 Blue Ant trilogy Hubertus Bigend Pattern Recognition 2003 Spook Country 2007 Zero History 2010 Jackpot trilogy The Peripheral 2014 Agency 2020 Jackpot TBD Adapted screenplays Archangel 2016 2017 Graphic novel Alien 3 2018 2019 Graphic novel Alien III 2019 Audio drama Alien The Unproduced First Draft Screenplay by William Gibson 2021 Novel by Pat Cadigan Short stories Burning Chrome 1986 preface by Bruce Sterling collects Gibson s early short fiction listed by original publication date Fragments of a Hologram Rose 1977 UnEarth 3 Johnny Mnemonic 1981 Omni The Gernsback Continuum 1981 Universe 11 Hinterlands 1981 Omni The Belonging Kind with John Shirley 1981 Shadows 4 Burning Chrome 1982 Omni Red Star Winter Orbit with Bruce Sterling 1983 Omni New Rose Hotel 1984 Omni The Winter Market Nov 1985 Vancouver Dogfight with Michael Swanwick 1985 Omni Skinner s Room Nov 1991 Omni Nonfiction Agrippa A Book of the Dead 1992 a poem and artist s book No Maps for These Territories 2000 an independent documentary film Distrust That Particular Flavor 2012 written over a period of more than twenty years Disneyland with the Death Penalty a 1993 Wired articleMedia appearances editNo Maps for These Territories 2000 169 Making of Johnny Mnemonic 1995 170 Cyberpunk 1990 171 Wild Palms 1993 Upload 2023 Explanatory notes edit 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 156 Gibson later successfully resisted attempts by Autodesk to copyright the word for their abortive foray into virtual reality 44 Several track names on Hamm s Kings of Sleep album Black Ice Count Zero Kings of Sleep reference Gibson s work 137 Idol released an album in 1993 titled Cyberpunk which featured a track named Neuromancer 44 Robert Christgau excoriated Idol s treatment of cyberpunk 138 and Gibson later stated that Idol had turned it into something very silly 87 Zevon s 1989 album Transverse City was inspired by Gibson s fiction 139 Both the Internet with its dramatic social effects and the cyberpunk genre itself were also anticipated in John Brunner s 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider 154 155 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 amp 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 edit Thill Scott March 17 2011 March 17 1948 William Gibson Father of Cyberspace WIRED Archived from the original on December 21 2018 Retrieved March 15 2018 a b Gibson William Archived December 7 2010 at the Wayback Machine The Locus Index to SF Awards Index of Literary Nominees Locus Publications Retrieved April 12 2013 Inkpot Award December 6 2012 Archived from the original on January 29 2017 Retrieved October 23 2020 Gibson William Bruce Sterling 1986 Introduction Burning Chrome New York Harper Collins ISBN 978 0 06 053982 5 OCLC 51342671 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 Bennie Angela September 7 2007 A reality stranger than fiction Sydney Morning Herald Fairfax Media Archived from 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 The Independent London Independent News amp 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 Gibson William July 2005 God s Little Toys Confessions of a cut amp paste artist Wired com Archived from the original on February 21 2007 Retrieved November 4 2007 a b c d e f g h i j k l McCaffery Larry 1991 An Interview with William Gibson Storming the Reality Studio a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern science fiction Durham North Carolina Duke University Press pp 263 285 ISBN 978 0 8223 1168 3 OCLC 23384573 Archived 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 a b Wiebe Joe October 13 2007 Writing Vancouver The Vancouver Sun Archived from the original on October 22 2012 Retrieved March 4 2017 a b Leonard Andrew February 2001 Riding shotgun with William Gibson Salon com Archived from the original on October 7 2007 Retrieved November 6 2007 Gibson William June 10 2008 William Gibson Talks to io9 About Canada Draft Dodging and Godzilla io9 Interview Interviewed by Annalee Newitz San Francisco Archived from the original on June 11 2008 Retrieved June 10 2008 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 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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 amp Nominees Worlds Without End Archived from the original on April 11 2016 Retrieved April 30 2009 1987 Award Winners amp Nominees Worlds Without End Archived from the original on February 25 2012 Retrieved April 30 2009 1989 Award Winners amp 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 a b Platt Adam September 16 1993 Cyberhero The Talk of the Town The New Yorker p 24 Archived from the original on February 23 1999 Retrieved November 6 2007 Alexander Scott August 9 2007 Spook Country Playboy com Archived from the original on July 5 2008 Retrieved November 6 2007 Leonard Andrew July 27 1999 An engine of anarchy Salon com Archived from the original on January 8 2008 a b c d Walker Martin September 3 1996 Blade Runner on electro steroids Mail amp Guardian Online M amp G Media Archived from the original on July 14 2014 Retrieved November 11 2007 Leonard Andrew September 14 1998 Is cyberpunk still breathing Salon com Archived from the original on July 14 2014 Retrieved November 6 2007 a b c Poole Steven October 30 1999 Nearing the nodal Books by genre London The Guardian Archived from the original on January 8 2008 Retrieved November 3 2007 a b Dueben Alex October 2 2007 An Interview With William Gibson The Father of Cyberpunk California Literary Review Archived from the original on October 11 2007 Retrieved October 4 2007 Clute John The Case of the World Excessive Candour SciFi com Archived from the original on October 30 2007 Retrieved October 14 2007 a b Chang Angela January 10 2007 Q amp A William Gibson PC Magazine 26 3 19 Archived from the original on May 1 2009 Retrieved September 18 2017 Hirst Christopher May 10 2003 Books Hardbacks The Independent Gibson William 23 28 7 okt 2010 Twitter Archived from the original on March 7 2021 Retrieved November 26 2017 Blue Ant Series Goodreads Archived from the original on April 19 2021 Retrieved November 26 2017 Blue Ant Book Series Amazon Archived from the original on March 8 2021 Retrieved November 26 2017 Gibson William 19 26 30 dec 2012 Twitter Archived from the original on March 7 2021 Retrieved November 26 2017 Gibson William 11 46 9 juli 2016 Twitter Archived from the original on March 8 2021 Retrieved November 26 2017 a b Garreau Joel September 6 2007 Through the Looking Glass The Washington Post Archived from the original on August 5 2016 Retrieved October 30 2007 Lim Dennis August 11 2007 Now Romancer Salon com Archived from the original on May 1 2008 Retrieved October 30 2007 Sutherland John August 31 2007 Node idea Guardian Unlimited London Guardian Media Group Archived from the original on September 6 2007 Retrieved November 11 2007 Lim Dennis February 18 2003 Think Different The Village Voice Village Voice Media Archived from the original on May 30 2019 Retrieved May 30 2019 Leonard Andrew February 13 2003 Nodal point Salon com Archived from the original on November 16 2007 Retrieved November 6 2007 Bennie Angela September 7 2007 A reality stranger than fiction Sydney Morning Herald Fairfax Media Archived from the original on September 11 2007 Retrieved January 21 2008 William Gibson Hates Futurists TheTyee ca October 18 2007 Archived from the original on October 26 2007 Retrieved October 26 2007 a b Gibson William March 2008 Interview de William Gibson VO ActuSF transcription Interviewed by Eric Holstein Raoul Abdaloff Paris Archived from the original on April 5 2008 Retrieved April 6 2008 William Gibson with Spook Country Studio One Bookclub CBC British Columbia Archived from the original on October 13 2007 Retrieved October 26 2007 Gibson still scares up a spooky atmosphere Providence Journal Archived from the original on January 16 2008 Retrieved October 26 2007 Sloan Robin October 27 2014 William Gibson s The Peripheral stars a plucky female gamer with 3D printing skills The Washington Post Archived from the original on October 28 2014 Retrieved October 28 2014 Fenlon Wesley April 24 2013 William Gibson Talks Sci Fi and His Next Novel at New York Public Library Tested Archived from the original on December 20 2013 Retrieved April 8 2014 Watch William Gibson read from his brand new science fiction novel io9 April 29 2013 Archived from the original on October 22 2015 Retrieved April 8 2014 Gibson William To readers of both The Peripheral and Archangel Twitter Archived from the original on March 8 2021 Retrieved November 18 2017 Terror Jude July 12 2018 Johnnie Christmas to Adapt William Gibson s Unpublished Aliens 3 Script as a Comic Book Bleeding Cool Archived from the original on November 9 2020 Retrieved September 6 2020 Conner Shawn August 13 2019 Join William Gibson and Johnnie Christmas for a special launch of their book Alien 3 Inside Vancouver Archived from the original on August 3 2020 Retrieved September 6 2020 Compare https www amazon com Agency William Gibson dp 110198693X ref sr 1 1 keywords agency william gibson amp qid 1554137189 amp s gateway amp sr 8 1 Archived April 19 2021 at the Wayback Machine with https www penguinrandomhouse com books 530536 agency by william gibson 9781101986936 Archived October 18 2018 at the Wayback Machine Rothman Joshua December 9 2019 How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real The New Yorker ISSN 0028 792X Archived from the original on December 16 2019 Retrieved December 16 2019 Gibson William Third final volume s working title Jackpot Twitter Archived from the original on August 14 2020 Retrieved September 6 2020 Gibson William I don t think I m going to call Agency s sequel Jackpot after all Twitter Archived from the original on January 23 2021 Retrieved February 19 2021 Gibson William March 31 1996 Foreword to City Come a walkin Archived from the original on June 26 2007 Retrieved May 1 2007 a b Brown Charles N William G Contento July 10 2004 Stories Listed by Author The Locus Index to Science Fiction 1984 1998 Locus Archived from the original on March 4 2007 Retrieved October 29 2007 a b c d e Gibson William May 1994 William Gibson Interviewed by Giuseppe Salza Interview Cannes Archived from the original on October 11 2011 Retrieved October 28 2007 Sterling Bruce William Gibson May 10 1993 Speeches by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling at the National Academy of Sciences Washington D C The WELL Archived from the original on October 27 2008 Retrieved October 29 2007 a b c Gibson William November 3 1994 I Don t Even Have A Modem Rapport Interview Interviewed by Dan Josefsson Stockholm TV2 Archived from the original on October 11 2007 Retrieved November 5 2007 a b c S Page William Gibson Bibliography Mediagraphy Archived from the original on October 15 2007 Retrieved February 9 2008 Yellow Magic Orchestra Technodon Discogs May 26 1993 Archived from the original on February 25 2008 Retrieved January 10 2008 Pener Degen August 22 1993 EGOS amp IDS Deborah Harry Is Low Key And Unblond The New York Times Archived from the original on April 19 2021 Retrieved November 7 2007 Edwards Gavin June 1992 Cyber Lit Details 134 Archived from the original on September 24 2008 Retrieved September 29 2008 Alien III Teaser Archived from the original on May 1 2019 Retrieved April 29 2019 a b Gibson William March 6 2003 Victor Tsoi Archived from the original on December 10 2007 Retrieved December 3 2007 Gibson William July 21 2006 Burst City Trailer Archived from the original on November 21 2007 Retrieved November 26 2007 Williams Owen October 28 2013 Vincenzo Natali Still Hopeful For Neuromancer Empire Archived from the original on December 12 2013 Retrieved February 25 2014 a b c Loder Kurt The Matrix Preloaded MTV s Movie House Mtv com Archived from the original on September 13 2007 Retrieved November 7 2007 William Gibson s Idoru Coming to Anime cyberpunkreview com April 21 2006 Archived from the original on September 14 2007 Gibson William May 1 2007 I ve Forgotten More Neuromancer Film Deals Than You ve Ever Heard Of Archived from the original on May 23 2007 Retrieved November 4 2007 Macnab Geoffrey January 27 2015 Simon Pummell preps William Gibson adaptation Dogfight Archived from the original on February 2 2015 Retrieved January 27 2015 Fridman Sherman February 24 2000 X Files Writer Fights For Online Privacy News Briefs Newsbytes PM a b Gibson William July 22 2006 Where The Holograms Go Archived from the original on November 21 2007 Retrieved November 26 2007 Cast Mon Amour Mon Parapluie Archived from the original on June 21 2004 Retrieved October 26 2007 Gibson William May 31 2003 Holy Body Tattoo Archived from the original on December 10 2007 Retrieved November 11 2007 Polledri Paolo 1990 Visionary San Francisco Munich Prestal ISBN 978 3 7913 1060 2 OCLC 22115872 a b Goldberger Paul August 12 1990 In San Francisco A Good Idea Falls With a Thud The New York Times Archived from the original on October 13 2007 Retrieved November 6 2007 Gibson William November 1991 Skinner s Room Omni Liu Alan June 30 2004 The laws of cool knowledge work and the culture of information Chicago University of Chicago Press pp 339 48 ISBN 978 0 226 48698 7 OCLC 53823956 Gibson William 1992 Introduction to Agrippa A Book of the Dead Archived from the original on November 20 2007 Retrieved November 11 2007 Kirschenbaum Matthew G 2008 Hacking Agrippa The Source of the Online Text Mechanisms new media and the forensic imagination 2 ed Cambridge Massachusetts MIT Press ISBN 978 0 262 11311 3 OCLC 79256819 Archived from the original on November 15 2007 Retrieved November 11 2007 The Agrippa Files Agrippa english ucsb edu Archived from the original on October 17 2011 Retrieved December 9 2015 a b Cracking the Agrippa Code Crackingagrippa net March 25 1992 Archived from the original on September 15 2015 Retrieved December 9 2015 Goodin Dan July 11 2012 Solve 20 year old mystery in William Gibson s Agrippa win prizes Ars Technica Archived from the original on July 26 2012 Retrieved July 24 2012 Gibson William September October 1993 Disneyland with the Death Penalty Wired Vol 1 no 4 Archived from the original on October 1 2008 Retrieved September 23 2008 Mehegan David March 1 1995 Multimedia Animal Wired Visionary Nicholas Negroponte is MIT s Loud Voice of the Future Boston Globe The New York Times Company Archived from the original on April 2 2015 Retrieved September 23 2008 Orlowski Andrew April 25 2003 William Gibson gives up blogging Music and Media The Register Archived from the original on August 14 2007 Retrieved November 3 2007 Gibson William September 12 2003 Endgame WilliamGibsonBooks com Archived from the original on December 30 2006 Retrieved November 26 2007 Gibson William June 1 2006 Moor WilliamGibsonBooks com Archived from the original on October 11 2007 Retrieved November 4 2007 Gibson William September 23 2006 Johnson Bros WilliamGibsonBooks com Archived from the original on October 21 2007 Retrieved November 4 2007 Gibson William October 3 2006 Their Different Drummer WilliamGibsonBooks com Archived from the original on October 21 2007 Retrieved November 4 2007 Gibson William July 30 2009 My poor old blog s just sitting there WilliamGibsonBooks com Archived from the original on December 20 2010 Retrieved September 1 2010 Kennedy Pagan January 13 2012 William Gibson s Future Is Now New York Times Book Review New York NY New York Times Archived from the original on January 21 2012 Retrieved January 22 2012 Frelik Pawel 2012 Review of William Gibson A Literary Companion Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23 3 86 506 508 ISSN 0897 0521 JSTOR 24353095 Fitting Peter July 1991 The Lessons of Cyberpunk In Penley C Ross A eds Technoculture Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press pp 295 315 ISBN 978 0 8166 1930 6 OCLC 22859126 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 Miller Laura 2000 Introduction The Salon Com Reader s Guide to Contemporary Authors New York Penguin Books ISBN 978 0 14 028088 3 OCLC 43384794 a b Brande David 1994 The Business of Cyberpunk Symbolic Economy and Ideology in William Gibson Configurations 2 3 509 536 doi 10 1353 con 1994 0040 S2CID 144829170 Archived from the original on February 11 2009 Retrieved August 27 2007 a b Sponsler Claire Winter 1992 Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative The Example of William Gibson Contemporary Literature 33 4 625 644 doi 10 2307 1208645 JSTOR 1208645 S2CID 163362863 a b Morgan Richard Recommended Reading List Archived from the original on April 11 2010 Retrieved July 4 2010 Trench Marianne and Peter von Brandenburg producers 1992 Cyberpunk Mystic Fire Video Intercon Productions Day Dwayne A April 21 2008 Miles to go before the Moon The Space Review Archived from the original on May 14 2008 Retrieved April 21 2008 Dyer Bennet Cynthia Cory Doctorow Talks About Nearly Everything Inkwell Authors and Artists The Well Archived from the original on September 27 2007 Retrieved August 30 2007 Writing Fiction in the Age of Google William Gibson Q amp A Part 3 Amazon Bookstore s Blog June 24 2007 Archived from the original on November 20 2007 Retrieved November 4 2007 Doherty Michael E Jr September 1995 Marshall McLuhan Meets William Gibson in Cyberspace CMC Magazine 4 Archived from the original on October 20 2007 Retrieved October 28 2007 Branch Jordan 2020 What s in a Name Metaphors and Cybersecurity International Organization 75 39 70 doi 10 1017 S002081832000051X ISSN 0020 8183 S2CID 224886794 Archived from the original on September 27 2020 Retrieved September 26 2020 Prucher Jeff 2007 cyberspace Brave New Words The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction Oxford University Press p 31 ISBN 978 0 19 530567 8 OCLC 76074298 Irvine Martin January 12 1997 Postmodern Science Fiction and Cyberpunk Archived from the original on December 5 2006 Retrieved November 23 2006 Liquid Science Fiction Interview with William Gibson by Bernard Joisten and Ken Lum Purple Prose Paris N 9 ete pp 10 16 Stuart Hamm 1989 Kings of Sleep CD liner Relativity Records Christgau Robert August 10 1993 Virtual Hep Village Voice Archived from the original on June 16 2012 Retrieved November 11 2007 Cook Bob February 10 2002 Requiem for a Rock Satirist Flak Magazine Archived from the original on October 15 2007 Retrieved November 11 2007 Straylight Run MTV com Archived from the original on October 1 2007 Retrieved September 9 2007 GPod Audio Books Neuromancer by William Gibson GreyLodge Podcast Publishing company Archived from the original on May 15 2006 Retrieved April 9 2007 Gibson William 2005 U2 s City of Blinding Lights Wired Vol 13 no 8 Archived from the original on October 24 2012 Retrieved March 12 2017 Interviews Zeromancer MK Magazine November 1 2003 Archived from the original on July 4 2008 Retrieved September 2 2008 Hepfer Karl 2001 The Matrix Problem I The Matrix Mind and Knowledge Erfurt Electronic Studies in English ISSN 1430 6905 Archived from the original on July 5 2004 Retrieved August 27 2007 Blackford Russell July 2004 Reading the Ruined Cities Science Fiction Studies 31 93 Archived from the original on November 24 2007 Retrieved December 2 2007 Gibson William January 28 2003 The Matrix Fair Cop Archived from the original on September 26 2007 Retrieved November 4 2007 Cyberspace coiner returns to native SC for honorary degree Reading Eagle Associated Press May 10 2008 Archived from the original on July 14 2014 Retrieved June 8 2008 2008 Science Fiction Hall of Fame Ceremony Tickets On Sale May 15 Archived from the original on May 10 2008 Retrieved March 21 2013 Press release April May 2008 Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame empsfm org Archived May 10 2008 Retrieved March 19 2013 Rosenberg Scott April 19 1992 Virtual Reality Check Digital Daydreams Cyberspace Nightmares San Francisco Examiner p C1 O Toole Garson January 24 2012 The Future Has Arrived It s Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet Quote Investigator Archived from the original on June 30 2013 Retrieved January 28 2021 Postel J November 1981 NCP TCP Transition Plan doi 10 17487 RFC0801 RFC 801 Zakon Robert H November 1 2006 Hobbes Internet Timeline v8 2 Zakon Group LLC Archived from the original on May 5 2009 Retrieved October 31 2007 Matrix Netlingo Archived from the original on September 27 2007 Retrieved September 9 2007 Roger Clarke 1993 A Future Trace on Dataveillance The Anti Utopian and Cyberpunk Literary Genres Archived from the original on August 14 2008 Retrieved September 17 2008 Hollinger Veronica Joan Gordon 2002 Edging Into the Future University of Pennsylvania Press p 35 ISBN 978 0 8122 1804 6 Barry M Leiner Vinton G Cerf David D Clark Robert E Kahn Leonard Kleinrock Daniel C Lynch Jon Postel Larry G Roberts Stephen Wolff December 10 2003 A Brief History of the Internet 3 32 Internet Society p 1011 arXiv cs 9901011 Bibcode 1999cs 1011L Archived from the original on December 22 2001 Retrieved November 3 2007 Blanchard Jayne M September 12 1993 Sci Fi Author Gibson Is Cyber Crowd s Guru St Paul Pioneer Press MediaNews Group 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 Kahney Leander November 14 2002 Early Desktop Pic Ahead of Time Wired Archived from the original on December 27 2008 Retrieved January 10 2008 Sci Fi Writer High Tech Marketer on Awards Jury Mediacaster April 3 2008 Archived from the original on January 28 2013 Retrieved April 21 2008 Gibson William Jack Womack 2004 Neuromancer New York Ace Books p 269 ISBN 978 0 441 01203 9 OCLC 55745255 Rapatzikou Tatiani 2004 Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson Amsterdam Rodopi ISBN 978 90 420 1761 0 OCLC 55807961 Dear Michael Steven Flusty March 1998 Postmodern Urbanism Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 1 50 72 doi 10 1111 1467 8306 00084 S2CID 195792324 Pesce Mark Magic Mirror The Novel as a Software Development Platform MIT Communications Forum Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archived from the original on June 11 2008 Retrieved December 2 2007 Pesce Mark July 13 1998 3 D epiphany Salon com Archived from the original on July 14 2014 Retrieved November 6 2007 edition of August 14 2006 of the free daily Metro International interview by Amy Benfer Gibson William September 3 2003 Humility and Prescience Salon com Archived from the original on December 30 2006 Retrieved November 26 2007 a b c An Interview with William Gibson Computer Gaming World September 1988 p 30 Archived from the original on October 2 2019 Retrieved November 3 2013 Rosenberg Scott William Gibson Webmaster The Salon Interview Salon com Archived from the original on September 7 2007 Retrieved November 6 2007 No Maps for These Territories IMDb Archived from the original on November 11 2020 Retrieved October 14 2020 Making of Johnny Mnemonic IMDb Archived from the original on October 29 2020 Retrieved May 12 2020 Cyberpunk IMDb Archived from the original on August 14 2020 Retrieved May 12 2020 Further reading editOlsen Lance 1992 William Gibson San Bernardino Borgo Press ISBN 978 1 55742 198 2 OCLC 27254726 Cavallaro Dani 2000 Cyberpunk and Cyberculture Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson London Athlone Press ISBN 978 0 485 00607 0 OCLC 43751735 Tatsumi Takayuki 2006 Full Metal Apache Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant Pop America Durham Duke University Press ISBN 978 0 8223 3774 4 OCLC 63125607 Yoke Carl B Robinson Carol eds 2007 The Cultural Influences of William Gibson the Father of Cyberpunk Science Fiction Lewiston New York Edwin Mellen Pr ISBN 978 0 7734 5467 5 OCLC 173809083 External links editWilliam Gibson at Wikipedia s sister projects nbsp Media from Commons nbsp Quotations from Wikiquote nbsp Data from Wikidata Official website nbsp 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 Portal nbsp Speculative fiction Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title William Gibson amp oldid 1183405589, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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