William Gibson

Gibson's father choked to death in a restaurant, away on business, a little over a year after the family moved to Norfolk, Virginia. Gibson was six. His mother could not bring herself to tell him and had somebody else do it, then took him back to Wytheville, the small town in the Virginia Appalachians where both of them had grown up. He read compulsively and made few friends. When she threatened him with boarding school he accepted gladly, and spent his adolescence at the Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson, resenting the structure and later crediting it with forcing him to speak to people. His mother died when he was 18. He left school without graduating, and in 1967 he moved to Canada.

He settled in Vancouver in 1972 with a Vancouverite he had met in Toronto, and has written everything since from there, American-born and writing almost entirely about America. The stories came first, from 1977, mostly in Omni. In "Burning Chrome" (1982) he coined the word cyberspace, and in Neuromancer, two years later, defined it: a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions. It is still the only novel to win the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick award. He wrote it on a 1927 Hermes portable typewriter, and has said he had never so much as touched a PC.

He is credited with predicting the internet, virtual reality, hacking culture and the whole texture of a network society run by corporations, and he has spent 40 years refusing the credit. Science fiction, he told CNN in 1997, is best used to explore the present, because Earth is the alien planet now. He put the prescience of Neuromancer down to his almost perfect ignorance of the technology he was extrapolating from, and has noted that the book contains no mobile phones, while its near future runs on a Japanese ascendancy that stalled within a decade of publication. By 2003 he had moved the novels to the present day, arguing that the present had become strange enough. The line he is quoted on most is his own: the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed.

The Matrix took its title, its characters and much of its story from the Sprawl books. Cyberspace escaped the novel entirely, and by the mid-1990s it was the ordinary word for the thing everyone had suddenly started doing. Jacking in, ICE and the matrix went with it. Very few novelists have put a word into general English, and fewer still have been alive to watch it get worn out. Amazon adapted The Peripheral in 2022. Gibson is 78, still in Vancouver, and still publishing, and the argument about how much he got right is not settled.

William Gibson's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Neuromancer book
  The first novel, and the only one to take the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick award 1984
• Burning Chrome book
  Collected stories, including the 1982 title story that coined cyberspace 1986
• Mona Lisa Overdrive book
  Closes the Sprawl trilogy begun with Neuromancer and Count Zero (1986) 1988
• The Difference Engine book
  Written with Bruce Sterling — the best-known steampunk novel 1990
• Pattern Recognition book
  The first of the novels set in the present day 2003
• The Peripheral book
  Adapted by Amazon in 2022 2014

• c. 1954 aged ~6 His father chokes to death in a restaurant on a business trip Gibson has given his age as six. One scholar puts him at eight.
• c. 1966 aged ~18 His mother dies and he leaves school without graduating He was 18. She had sent him to boarding school in Tucson after his father's death.
• 1967 aged ~19 Moves to Canada He said later that he went with a vague idea of avoiding the Vietnam draft and that he was never actually called.
• 1972 aged ~24 Marries and settles in Vancouver, where he has lived ever since
• 1977 aged ~29 Takes a degree in English at UBC and publishes his first story Fragments of a Hologram Rose, written for a science fiction course taught by Susan Wood.
• 1982 aged ~34 Coins the word cyberspace in the story Burning Chrome Published in Omni. He defined it two years later in Neuromancer.
• July 1, 1984 aged 36 Ace Books publishes Neuromancer Written on a 1927 Hermes portable typewriter.
• 1985 aged ~37 Neuromancer takes the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick award Still the only novel to win all three.
• October 2022 aged 74 Amazon releases a television adaptation of The Peripheral

• Philip K. Dick 1928–1982
  Wrote 45 novels asking whether reality is real and who counts as human, and Hollywood has filmed them ever since. won the award named for
• Robert A. Heinlein 1907–1988
  Science fiction novelist — Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land broke with
• Isaac Asimov 1920–1992
  Writer whose science fiction and popular science helped shape public imagination about robots, technology, and the future. broke with
• Ray Kurzweil b. 1948
  Built the first machine that read print aloud to the blind, then spent decades predicting when machines would surpass us. contrasted with
• Don DeLillo b. 1936
  Novelist of American crowds, media saturation and disaster often compared with