page_title: William Gibson
section_title: Visionary influence and prescience
hierarchical_section_title: William Gibson / Influence and recognition / Visionary influence and prescience
caption_attribution_description: William Gibson at the Scylla bookstore in Paris, France.
context_page_description: William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome", and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer. These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.
  After expanding on the story in Neuromancer with two more novels, thus completing the dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson collaborated with Bruce Sterling on the alternate history novel The Difference Engine, which became an important work of the science fiction subgenre known as steampunk.
context_section_description: In Neuromancer, Gibson first used the term "matrix" to refer to the visualized Internet, two years after the nascent Internet was formed in the early 1980s from the computer networks of the 1970s. Gibson thereby imagined a worldwide communications network years before the origin of the World Wide Web, although related notions had previously been imagined by others, including science fiction writers. At the time he wrote "Burning Chrome", Gibson "had a hunch that [the Internet] would change things, in the same way that the ubiquity of the automobile changed things." In 1995, he identified the advent, evolution and growth of the Internet as "one of the most fascinating and unprecedented human achievements of the century", a new kind of civilization that is – in terms of significance — on a par with the birth of cities, and in 2000 predicted it would lead to the death of the nation state.
  Observers contend that Gibson's influence on the development of the Web reached beyond prediction; he is widely credited with creating an iconography for the information age, long before the embrace of the Internet by the mainstream. Gibson introduced, in Neuromancer, the notion of the "meatpuppet", and is credited with inventing—conceptually rather than participatorally—the phenomenon of virtual sex. 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. Steven Poole claims that in writing the Sprawl trilogy Gibson laid the "conceptual foundations for the explosive real-world growth of virtual environments in video games and the Web". In his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack suggests that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the Internet (and the Web particularly) developed, following the publication of Neuromancer in 1984, asking "what if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"
  Gibson scholar Tatiani G. Rapatzikou has commented, in Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson, on the origin of the notion of cyberspace:
  Gibson's vision, generated by the monopolising appearance of the terminal image and presented in his creation of the cyberspace matrix, came to him when he saw teenagers playing in video arcades. The physical intensity of their postures, and the realistic interpretation of the terminal spaces projected by these games – as if there were a real space behind the screen—made apparent the manipulation of the real by its own representation.
  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 affected 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.
  When an interviewer in 1988 asked about the Bulletin Board System jargon in his writing, Gibson answered "I'd never so much as touched a PC when I wrote Neuromancer"; he was familiar, he said, with the science-fiction community, which overlapped with the BBS community. Gibson similarly did not play computer games despite appearing in his stories. He wrote Neuromancer on a 1927 olive-green Hermes portable typewriter, which G
caption: Gibson is renowned for his visionary influence on—and predictive attunement to—technology, design, urban sociology and cyberculture. Image captured in the Scylla bookstore of Paris, France on March 14, 2008.
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