William Gibson

Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace’ for widespread, interconnected digital technology in his short story ‘Burning Chrome’ His early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans. Gibson has written more than 20 short stories and 10 critically acclaimed novels.

About William Gibson in brief

Summary William GibsonWilliam Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist. He is widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace’ for widespread, interconnected digital technology in his short story ‘Burning Chrome’ His early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans. Gibson has written more than 20 short stories and 10 critically acclaimed novels. His work has been cited as influencing a variety of disciplines: academia, design, film, literature, music, cyberculture, and technology. 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\” Gibson’s most recent novels, The Peripheral and Agency, returned to a more overt engagement with technology and recognizable science fiction themes. He has also collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers, and musicians. Gibson is the author of several books of essays, including ‘The Art of Cyberpunk’ and ‘Cyberpunk: A Biography of a Cyberpunk Novel’, published by Simon & Schuster. He also has a book of short stories, ‘Cyberspace: A Short Story’, which was published by Macmillan in 1998. Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, was published in the late 1970s. His second novel, The Difference Engine, was released in the early 1980s. 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.

His third novel, Sprawl, became an important work of the steampunk sub genre known as steampunk. Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina, and grew up in Wytheville, Virginia. His father choked to death in a restaurant while on a business trip. Gibson credits the beginnings of his relationship with science fiction, his native literary culture, and the subsequent feeling of abrupt exile with the death of his father with his early love of science fiction. His mother sent him to a private boarding school for boys in Tucson, Arizona, but he scored 148 out of 150 in the SAT exams. Gibson took refuge in reading as well as writers such as William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller, and became frustrated with academic performance. As a teenager, Gibson found religion and monulture to be ‘highly problematic’, and he consciously rejected religion and religious monulture. He later wrote a book about his experiences as a shy, ungainly teenager, called ‘Gibson: A Memoir of a Shy, Ungainly Teenage Boy’, about his time in private school in Tucson. Gibson also wrote a short story about his experience at private school, which he described as ‘a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted’ He has written several novels, including the dystopic Sprawl trilogy and the alternate history novel The Difference engine.