William Ford Gibson is an American-canadian speculative fiction novel writer who has been named the noir prophet of the cyberpunk subgenre. Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his short story Burning Chrome and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer. In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson produced an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality TV and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web.
Having changed residence frequently with his family as a child, Gibson became a shy, ungainly teenager who often read science fiction. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding colledge in Arizona, Gibson evaded the draft during the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada in 1968, where he became immersed in the counterculture and after settling in Vancouver eventually became a full-time author. He retains dual citizenship. Gibson's early books are bleak, noir near-future novels about the effect of cybernetics and computer networks on humans a combination of lowlife and high tech. The short novels were released in popular science fiction magazines. The themes, settings and characters developed in these novels culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered critical and commercial success, virtually initiating the cyberpunk literary genre.
William Gibson
