page_title: William Gibson
section_title: Blue Ant
hierarchical_section_title: William Gibson / Literary career / Blue Ant
caption_attribution_description: Author en:William Gibson signing a copy of his novel en:Zero History at Forbidden Planet in London on October 20, 2010.
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: After All Tomorrow's Parties, Gibson began to adopt a more realist style of writing, with continuous narratives – "speculative fiction of the very recent past." 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), Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010) are 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.
  When asked on Twitter what this series of novels should be called ("The Bigend Trilogy? The Blue Ant Cycle? What?"), Gibson replied "I prefer 'books'. The Bigend books." However, "Blue Ant" rather than "Bigend" has become the standard signifier. At a later date, Gibson stated that he did not name his trilogies, "I wait to see what people call them," and has in 2016 used "the Blue Ant books" in a tweet.
  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. These websites tracked the references and story elements in the novels through online resources such as Google and Wikipedia and collated the results, essentially creating hypertext versions of the books. Critic John Sutherland characterized 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. Examination of cultural changes in post-September 11 America, including a resurgent tribalism and the "infantilization of society", became a prominent theme of Gibson's work. The focus of his writing nevertheless remains "at the intersection of paranoia and technology".
caption: Gibson signing one of his novels in 2010
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