Everything about William Gibson totally explained
William Ford Gibson (born
17 March 1948) is an
American-
Canadian writer who has been called the "noir prophet" of the
cyberpunk subgenre of
science fiction. His family moved frequently during Gibson's youth due to his father's position as manager of a large construction company.
Gibson's early writings are generally near-future stories about the influences of
cybernetics and
cyberspace (computer-simulated reality) technology on the human race. His themes of hi-tech
shanty towns, recorded or broadcast stimulus (later to be developed into the "sim-stim" package featured so heavily in
Neuromancer), and dystopic intermingling of technology and humanity, are already evident in his first published short story, "
Fragments of a Hologram Rose" (1977).
In the early 1980s, Gibson's stories appeared in
Omni and
Universe 11, wherein his fiction developed a
film noir, bleak feel. He consciously distanced himself as far as possible from the mainstream of science fiction (towards which he felt "an aesthetic revulsion", expressed in "
The Gernsback Continuum"), to the extent that his highest goal was to become "a minor cult figure, a sort of lesser
Ballard." Gibson undertook the actual writing out of "blind animal terror" at the obligation to write an entire novel – a feat which he felt he was "four or five years away from." He re-wrote the first two-thirds of the book twelve times, feared losing the reader's attention and was convinced that he'd be "permanently shamed" following its publication; yet what resulted was a major imaginative leap forward for a first-time novelist.
Lawrence Person in his "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto" (1998) identified
Neuromancer as "the archetypal cyberpunk work", and in 2005,
Time magazine included it in their list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, opining that "[t]here is no way to overstate how radical [
Neuromancer] was when it first appeared." According to literary critic
Larry McCaffery, the auspiciousness of the novel was in its originality of vision, exhilarating prose, and technological similes and metaphors. He described the concept of the matrix as a place where "data dance with human consciousness... human memory is literalized and mechanized... multi-national information systems mutate and breed into startling new structures whose beauty and complexity are unimaginable, mystical, and above all nonhuman." He next intended to write an unrelated
postmodern space opera, titled
The Log of the Mustang Sally, but reneged on the contract with
Arbor House after a falling out over the
dustjacket art of their hardcover of
Count Zero. Abandoning
The Log of the Mustang Sally, Gibson instead wrote
Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), a stylistically virtuosic novel which in the words of Larry McCaffery "turned off the lights" on cyberpunk literature.
Gibson's second series, "the
Bridge trilogy", is composed of
Virtual Light (1993), a "
darkly comic urban
detective story", The
Salon.com's Andrew Leonard notes that in the Bridge trilogy, Gibson's villains change from
multinational corporations and
artificial intelligences of the Sprawl trilogy to the
mass media – namely
tabloid television and the
cult of celebrity,
Virtual Light depicts an "end-stage
capitalism, in which
private enterprise and the profit motive are taken to their logical conclusion". while critic
Steven Poole asserted that
All Tomorrow's Parties marked his development from "science-fiction hotshot to wry
sociologist of the near future." Science fiction critic
John Clute has interpreted this approach as Gibson's recognition that traditional
science fiction is no longer possible "in a world lacking coherent 'nows' to continue from", characterizing it as "SF for the new century". Gibson's novels
Pattern Recognition (2003) and
Spook Country (2007) were both set in the same contemporary universe – "more or less the same one we live in now" – and put Gibson's work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time. As well as the setting, the novels share some of the same characters, including
Hubertus Bigend and Pamela Mainwaring – employees of the enigmatic marketing company Blue Ant.
A phenomenon peculiar to this era was the independent development of
annotating fansites,
PR-Otaku
and
Node Magazine, devoted to
Pattern Recognition and
Spook Country respectively. Critic
John Sutherland characterised this phenomenon as threatening "to completely overhaul the way
literary criticism is conducted".
After the
September 11, 2001 attacks, with about 100 pages of
Pattern Recognition written, Gibson had to re-write the main character's backstory, which had been suddenly rendered implausible; he called it "the strangest experience I've ever had with a piece of fiction." He saw the attacks as a
nodal point in history, "an experience out of culture", and "in some ways... the true beginning of the 21st century." He is noted as one of the first novelists to use the attacks to inform his writing. The focus of his writing nevertheless remains "at the intersection of paranoia and technology".
Collaborations, adaptations and miscellanea
Literary collaborations
Three of the stories that later appeared in
Burning Chrome were written in collaboration with other authors: "
The Belonging Kind" (1981) with
John Shirley, "
Red Star, Winter Orbit" (1983) with
Bruce Sterling, and "
Dogfight" (1985) with
Michael Swanwick. Gibson had previously written the foreword to Shirley's 1980 novel
City Come A-walkin
In Neuromancer, Gibson first used the term "" to refer to the visualised Internet, two years after the nascent Internet was formed in the early 1980s from the computer networks of the 1970s. In this conception of the "matrix", he predicted a worldwide communications network eleven years before the origin of the World Wide Web, although related notions had been described elsewhere. At the time he wrote "Burning Chrome", Gibson "had a hunch that [theInternet] would change things, in the same way that the ubiquity of the automobile changed things." and in 2000 predicted it would lead to the death of the nation state. His influence on early pioneers of desktop environment digital art has been acknowledged, and he holds an honorary doctorate from Parsons The New School for Design. Larry McCaffery claims that in writing the Sprawl trilogy Gibson laid the "conceptual foundations for the explosive real-world growth of virtual environments in videogames and the Web".
Gibson scholar Tatiani G. Rapatzikou has commented, in Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson, on the origin of the notion of cyberspace:
In his Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, Gibson is credited with being one of the few observers to explore the portents of the information age for notions of the sociospatial structuring of cities. Not all responses to Gibson's visions have been positive, however; virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce, though acknowledging their heavy influence on him and that "no other writer had so eloquently and emotionally effected the direction of the hacker community," dismissed them as "adolescent fantasies of violence and disembodiment". In Pattern Recognition, the plot revolves around snippets of film footage posted anonymously to various locations on the Internet. Characters in the novel speculate about the filmmaker's identity, motives, methods and inspirations on several websites, anticipating the 2006 Lonelygirl15 internet phenomenon. However, Gibson later disputed the notion that the creators of Lonelygirl15 drew influence from him. Another phenomenon anticipated by Gibson is the rise of reality television, for example in Virtual Light, which featured a satirical extrapolated version of COPS.
For his part, Gibson rejects any notion of prophecy, never having had a special relationship with computers – until 1996 he didn't have an email address, or even a modem, which he claimed at the time was motivated by a desire to avoid correspondence that would distract him from writing. An anecdote often recited in cybercultural enclaves and English departments holds that Neuromancer was written on a manual typewriter; the author has confirmed that the novel was written on a 1927 model of an olive-green Hermes portable typewriter, which looked to him as "the kind of thing Hemingway would have used in the field".
Selected bibliography
Novels
- Sprawl trilogy:
- Neuromancer (1984)
- Count Zero (1986)
- Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)
- The Difference Engine (1990; with Bruce Sterling)
- Bridge trilogy:
- Virtual Light (1993)
- Idoru (1996)
- All Tomorrow's Parties (1999)
- Pattern Recognition (2003)
- Spook Country (2007)
Nonfiction
- Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (1992) – a nonfiction artist's book
Short stories
- Burning Chrome (1986, preface by Bruce Sterling), collects Gibson's early short fiction, listed by original publication date:
- "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" (1977, UnEarth 3)
- "Johnny Mnemonic" (1981, Omni)
- "The Gernsback Continuum" (1981, Universe II)
- "Hinterlands" (1981, Omni)
- "New Rose Hotel" (1981, Omni)
- "The Belonging Kind", with John Shirley (1981, Shadows 4)
- "Burning Chrome" (1982, Omni)
- "Red Star, Winter Orbit", with Bruce Sterling (1983, Omni)
- "The Winter Market" (Nov 1985, Vancouver)
- "Dogfight", with Michael Swanwick (1985, Omni)
Further Information
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