William Gibson

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 fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam era draft in the United States, 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 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).

The novels rounding out his first trilogy in what is commonly known as the "Sprawl Trilogy" are Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Gibson also wrote a second trilogy centered on the San Francisco of the near future, which deal with Gibson's recurring theme of transcendence in a more grounded, matter-of-fact way than his first trilogy. The books in this trilogy are titled Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties.

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 favor 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 focus on technological change, especially its darker, less predictable social consequences.

In addition to his conventionally-published works, he wrote Agrippa, an electronic poem published in 1992. It was about the ethereal nature of memories, written in 1992 for "a multi-unit artwork to be designed by artist Dennis Ashbaugh and "published" by art-guy Kevin Begos. Ashbaugh's design eventually included a supposedly self-devouring floppy disk intended to display the text only once, then eat itself" after being read, but has since found its way onto the Internet. He commenced writing a blog in early 2003, which remains active, with one major hiatus, into 2005. Gibson also wrote a highly anticipated treatment of Alien 3, few elements of which found their way into the 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.

Despite all this, Gibson never had a special relationship with computers.

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If you realy want to understand the man you have to get this documentatry, William Gibson - No Maps for These Territories. It is one of the prized DVDs in my personal collection.