WILLIAM
GIBSON

William Ford Gibson was born in 1948 in Conway, South Carolina, and grew up in a small Virginia town. His father died when Gibson was six, and his mother when he was eighteen — formative losses that would later surface in the orphaned, rootless characters who populate his fiction. He moved to Canada in 1967 to avoid the Vietnam War draft, eventually settling in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he has lived for most of his adult life.

Gibson came to writing late and accidentally. He enrolled at the University of British Columbia, where he encountered the work of William S. Burroughs and the New Wave science fiction of J.G. Ballard — writers who treated the genre as a vehicle for literary experimentation rather than pulp entertainment. He began publishing short stories in science fiction magazines in the late 1970s.

In 1981, his short story "Burning Chrome" introduced the concepts of cyberspace and the Sprawl to the world. The following year, editor Terry Carr commissioned Gibson to write a novel for his prestigious Ace Science Fiction Specials series. Gibson, who had never written a novel and barely understood the computing technology he was describing, wrote Neuromancer in what he described as "blind animal panic" — convinced it would be a failure.

It was not a failure. Neuromancer won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award simultaneously — the only novel ever to achieve this "triple crown." It transformed science fiction, gave the internet its cultural vocabulary before the internet existed, and made Gibson one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

Gibson has consistently resisted the label of "visionary," arguing that science fiction is not about predicting the future but about examining the present through a distorting lens. His later work — the Bridge trilogy, the Blue Ant trilogy, and the Jackpot trilogy — moved progressively closer to the present day, until he was writing about the world as it was rather than as it might become.