Gibson, William
Identification American cyberpunk writer
Born March 17, 1948; Conway, South Carolina
Gibson’s novels and stories written in the 1980’s examine
the effects, mostly negative, of new computer and telecom-
munication technologies on the world’s population. They
are credited with inspiring the cyberpunk subgenre of sci-
ence fiction.
As a boy and young teenager, Gibson was an avid
reader of science fiction. He discovered William S.
Burroughs when he was fifteen, which led him to
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and the other Beat au-
thors. In 1968, he fled from the United States to Can-
ada to avoid military service. He began to write seri-
ously in 1977 and made his first sale in 1979.
Gibson’s first novel,Neuromancer(1984), was the
first one ever to sweep the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip
K. Dick awards. Ironically, given the novel’s subject
matter, Gibson wrote it and his other early stories on
a manual typewriter, because he could not afford a
dedicated word processor or even one of the early
personal computers.Neuromancerformed the first
book of the Cyberspace Trilogy, which Gibson com-
pleted during the 1980’s, publishingCount Zeroin
1986 andMona Lisa Overdrivein 1988. Some of the
stories in his collectionBurning Chrome(1986) are
set in the same dystopian future that forms the back-
drop to the trilogy. The titular “cyberspace” repre-
sents the marriage of virtual-reality technology with
the Internet; it is treated in Gibson’s work as a place
that someone can visit or even live. In Gibson’s
twenty-first century, multinational corporations are
more powerful than most governments, there are no
democracies left, and there is a direct relationship
between power and technology.
Gibson had already written about one-third of
Neuromancerwhen the movieBlade Runnerpremiered
in 1982. Some critics have unfairly criticized Gib-
son’s novel as derivative of the film, but it would be
more accurate to say that they share many of the
same influences, especially the writings of Philip K.
Dick, upon whose 1968 novelDo Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?the film was based.
Impact Gibson’s novels became the most famous
exemplars of cyberpunk, a science-fiction subgenre
that portrayed hypertechnological societies in
which the human mind and computers had become
linked. Like Gibson, other cyberpunk authors such
as Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, and Michael Swan-
wick used their fictional representations to com-
ment on the distribution of power and the use of
technology in the real world of the 1980’s. Gibson
not only changed the direction of science fiction
during the 1980’s but also invented words that be-
came part of the vernacular, such as “netsurfing,”
“cyberspace,” and “jacking in.” “Cyberspace” became
almost synonymous with the Internet and the World
Wide Web, although the actual technologies differ
significantly from those represented in Gibson’s fic-
tion.
Further Reading
Hafner, Katie, and John Markoff.Cyberpunk: Outlaws
and Hackers on the Computer Frontier.New York: Si-
mon & Schuster, 1991.
Rheingold, Howard.Virtual Reality.New York: Sum-
mit Books, 1991.
Thomas R. FellerThe Eighties in America Gibson, William 415
William Gibson.(Karen Moskowitz)