Gibson, William

1948–

Science-Fiction Author

In his 1984 book Neuromancer, novelist William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace,” which, like “information superhighway,” has been adopted as a universal euphemism for the Internet. That book and his subsequent novels have made Gibson the leader of a new school of science fiction called cyberpunk—a gritty, cynical rendering of the future that combines the punk attitude from rock ‘n’ roll culture, the cynical cadences of mystery writer Raymond Chandler, and an often hellish vision of a technocentric near future.

Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina, the son of a civilian contractor who helped build the Oak Ridge plant that manufactured the first atomic bomb. After his father's death, Gibson moved with his mother to a small mountain town in southwestern Virginia, later moving on to attend boarding school in southern Arizona. He avoided the Vietnam War draft at age 19 by fleeing the United States for Canada, and has lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, since 1972.

Gibson wrote his first fiction when he was a student at the University of British Columbia, where he earned a bachelor's degree in English literature. In 1981, three years before he published his first novel, Gibson published the seminal short story “The Gernsback Continuum,” which skewers the utopian techno-visions of past science-fiction writers, and goads emerging writers to address the ambivalence of a society where technology is both intimate and invasive, where the haves and have-nots must battle for control of a new, digital landscape. Some critics consider this short story to be the real blueprint for all cyberpunk to come.

Nonetheless, it is 1984's Neuromancer, Gibson's first novel, that remains the work with which his name and reputation are most often linked. Neuromancer concerns the exploits of an “interface cowboy” named Case whose stomping ground is “the matrix,” a digital place where he performs virtual highway robbery (not unlike the online credit-card thefts that sometimes happen today) on behalf of a black-market data-crime syndicate. What Case really desires, though, is “the bodiless exaltation of cyberspace.” Caught stealing from his employers, he is punished by having his nervous system and brain subtly damaged with a mycotoxin, rendering him unable to use his talents effectively as a cowboy in the Matrix. He is left with a body, nothing but “meat,” imprisoned in his flesh, his reality miserably lacking in virtuality—until he finds a new way to “jack in” and ride the electronic range once again.

The theme of bodilessness is an important one in Neuromancer, and in Gibson's other books. “People hate to be reminded sometimes that they have bodies, they find it very slow and tedious,” he told interviewer Dan Josefsson in 1994. “But I've never presented that as a desirable state, always as something almost pathological growing out of this technology.”

For Gibson, cyberspace is a fascinating and crucial new development in the history of mankind. It can go so far as to level the economic playing field between classes, he has said, but it is not preferable to the experience of being physically and mortally human. He has related that he doesn't like the “highway” metaphor for the Internet that has emerged in recent years. A highway implies two-way traffic, but as the Internet becomes commercialized, Gibson believes, what is left is a kind of virtual shopping mall. “They want to give you an infomall where you pay for every bit of information you download, and you'll download from a menu that some corporation has assembled,” he told Josefsson.

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