William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction.In 1982, Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" and popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). By visualising cyberspace as a worldwide communications network, Gibson foresaw the World Wide Web and created an iconography for the information age long before the spread of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as videogames and the Web.
Having moved around frequently with his family as a child, Gibson grew to be a shy, ungainly teenager who took refuge in reading science fiction. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding school in Arizona, Gibson dodged the draft during the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada in 1967, where he became immersed in counterculture and after settling in Vancouver eventually became a full-time writer. He retains dual citizenship.Gibson's early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of cybernetics and computer networks on humans - "lowlife meets high tech".The short stories were published in leading science fiction magazines and eventually revived science fiction, which at the time was widely considered insignificant. The themes, settings and characters developed in these stories culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered critical and commercial success, virtually launching the cyberpunk literary movement.
Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained rooted in Neuromancer, his work has continued to evolve in style and concept. After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson became a central figure to an entirely different science fiction sub-genre--steampunk--with the 1990 alternate history novel The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling. In the 1990s he composed the Bridge trilogy of novels, which made sociological observations of near-future urban environments and late capitalism. His most recent novels--Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007)--are set in a contemporary world and have put Gibson's work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.
Gibson is one of the most highly acclaimed North American science fiction writers,fêted by The Guardian in 1999 as "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades". Gibson has written more than twenty short stories, nine critically acclaimed novels (one in collaboration), and a nonfiction artist's book, and has contributed articles to several major publications and collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers and musicians. His thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors, design, academia, cyberculture, and technology.
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