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William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an author, mostly of science fiction novels, who lives in Canada. He has been called the father of the cyberpunk movement, a subgenre of science fiction.
Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina, USA. In 1968, he moved to Canada, and in 1972, he settled in Vancouver, B.C., where he began to write science fiction and has spent his adult life. His early works are generally futuristic stories about the influences of cybernetic and cyberspace (computer simulated reality) technology on the human race living in the imminent future. His '80s fiction, especially, has a noir, bleak feel. His first novel, Neuromancer, won three major science-fiction awards (Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Memorial Award).
More recently, Gibson has begun to move away from the fictional dystopias that made him famous, toward a more realist style of writing, eschewing his trademark jump-cuts in favour of continuity and narrative flow. The novel Pattern Recognition even saw him enter the mainstream bestseller lists for the first time. There is, however, still the focus on technological change, and in particular on its darker, less predictable social consequences.
In addition to his paper works, he also wrote an electronic poem called "Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)" in 1992, and flirted with writing a weblog from January to September 2003. Gibson has since taken up blogging again in October 2004. Gibson had also written a highly anticipated treatment of Alien 3, few elements of which ever found their way into the ultimate film.
Two of his short stories have been turned into movies: 1995's "Johnny Mnemonic", starring Keanu Reeves, and 1998's "New Rose Hotel", starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, and Asia Argento. Gibson, together with his friend Tom Maddox, wrote the X-Files episodes "Kill Switch" and "First Person Shooter" and made a cameo appearance in the latter. Gibson also made a cameo appearance in the miniseries Wild Palms, which was heavily influenced by the work of Gibson and other cyberpunk writers. Gibson's article on fellow cyberpunk and occasional collaborator John Shirley can be read here (http://www.darkecho.com/JohnShirley/gibson.html).
Despite all these, Gibson never had a special relationship with computers.
Bibliography
The Sprawl-trilogy offers some of the best cyberpunk reading ever. Novels
Collections
Uncollected short fiction
- Doing Television (1990)
- Skinner's Room (1990)
- Cyber-Claus (1991)
- Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City (1997)
Miscellaneous other work
- The Art of the X-Files, Introduction (1998)
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
William Gibson (novelist)
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