William Gibson (1948-present), the “Father of Cyberpunk”

William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction writer and essayist. He was born on March 17, 1948 in Conway, South Carolina, though he grew up in Wytheville, Virginia after his father's death led to the family moving. While he had an isolated, “disturbed” childhood, Gibson became interested in science fiction and writing at a young age, after buying an anthology at age 13 which introduced him to the works of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. His mother sent him to the Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson, Arizona hoping to boost his poor academic performance; however, after her death, Gibson dropped out before graduating and went traveling to “immerse himself” in counterculture. He emigrated to Canada in 1968 to evade the army draft, and holds dual citizenship as American and Canadian.

During 1967, Gibson lived in Toronto, Canada, and was jobless and homeless before aappearing in a CBC show concerning hippie culture. It was also in Toronto that he met his future wife, Deborah Jean Thompson. He and Thompson traveled together before marrying in 1972 and settling in Vancouver, British Columbia. While in Vancouver, Gibson attended the University of British Columbia for a Bachelor's in English, encouraging him to write his first short story, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose.” Gibson would go on to earn a master's degree in hard science fiction, and meet John Shirley, a punk musician and author, at a sci-fi convention in 1980. Shirley encouraged Gibson to pursue writing and became a lifelong friend who would influence Gibson's writing style.

Gibson is known as one of the creators of the cyberpunk genre after coining the term “cyberspace” in his short story, “Burning Chrome” (1982), though he never claimed to do so and Bruce Bethke's story “Cyberpunk” predated Gibson's works. Still, Gibson remains one of the most influential science fiction writers of the genre. At the same time as coining 'cyberspace', he created the concept of virtual reality years before the Internet became widespread in the 1990s. Gibson would later use the concept of cyberspace for the basis of his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), and most of his later work. He also predicted the heavy influence of reality TV and video games on society, though his stories have a dark, dystopian take on the future rather than utopian.

Neuromancer was expanded into the Sprawl trilogy with two sequels published in 1986 (Count Zero) and 1988 (Mona Lisa Overdrive), and is set in the same universe with his short stories “Johnny Mnemonic,” “New Rose Hotel,” and “Burning Chrome,” sharing characters, events, and themes. Gibson's second trilogy, the Bridge trilogy (Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999)), was written in the 1990s, and focuses on the effects of urbanization and capitalism rather than cybernetics.

While most of Gibson's work has been futuristic science-fiction dealing with the influence of cyberspace and cybernetics on the human condition, his more recent works (Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010) are of a contemporary, more realistic world, though still dealing with topics such as national security and information. All of his works deal with humanist themes, and Gibson has been frequented cited as a heavy influence on science fiction writers, academia, cyberculture, and technology. The California Literary Review heralds him as the “Father of Cyberpunk,” The Literary Encyclopedia calls him “one of North America's most highly acclaimed science fiction writers,” and The Guardian identified him as “probably the most important novelist of the past two decades” in 1999.

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Written by BrittanyBrandriff

Informations sources

“William Gibson." 2012. FamousAuthors.org 14 July, http://www.famousauthors.org/william-gibson

"William Gibson." Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Empmuseum.org, n.d. Web. 14 July 2014. <http://web.archive.org/web/20120722083618/http://www.empmuseum.org/exhibitions/index.asp?articleID=1282>.

Dueben, Alex. "William Gibson: The Father of Cyberpunk." California Literary Review. California Literary Review, 2 Oct. 2007. Web. 14 July 2014. <http://calitreview.com/263/william-gibson-the-father-of-cyberpunk/>.

Shachtman, Noah. "26 Years After Gibson, Pentagon Defines ‘Cyberspace’." Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 23 May 2008. Web. 14 July 2014. <http://www.wired.com/2008/05/pentagon-define/>.