Gibson, William (1948—)

An American science-fiction writer most renowned for coining the term "cyberspace" in Neuromancer (1984), the book hailed by many critics and technology buffs as the seminal work in the cyberpunk genre, William Gibson is most poignant in simultaneously relishing and demonizing the technologies which increasingly shape human relationships at the end of the millennium. The now-legendary idea of cyberspace, defined in Neuromancer and employed throughout his fiction, anticipated the Internet as a virtual playground where information is exchanged and where corporations rise and fall: "A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding." In a November 1994 interview for the Swedish news program Rapport (which is appropriately available on the Internet), Gibson calls the Internet "as significant as the birth of cities" and "a new kind of civilization" in its being primarily user-driven and transnational. Nevertheless, he also admits to not using "too glamorous" e-mail or even "browsing the 'Net," despite their correlation to his fiction, because of their great time investment and tendency to mark elitist distinctions of social class. As quoted by many of the Internet sites dedicated to his work, Gibson has said, "I'm not a techie. I don't know how these things work. But I like what they do, and the new human processes that they generate."

Gibson grew up in a small town on the edge of the Appalachian Mountains, dropped out of high school in 1967, and ended up in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. There he married Deborah Thompson in 1972. The couple has two children. He later earned a B.A. in 1977 from the University of British Columbia. By the early 1980s, Gibson was making a name for himself with stories such as "Johnny Mnemonic" and "Burning Chrome," many published in Omni magazine.

In his debut novel Neuromancer, Gibson evokes a near-future world organized by technological-corporate enclaves that circulate power through an elite of specialized information-manipulators. The players are typically "console cowboys" (cyberspace operators) who navigate the hallucinatory data-field which is cyberspace, "razor girls" (free-lance cybernetic assassins) who roam the "Sprawl" (the extended and dirty metropolis of discarded and constantly renovated technology), and a myriad of Japanese and Chinese syndicates who pull the strings. Hailed by the science-fiction community at its inception and increasingly studied at the university setting, Neuromancer won the prestigious Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award for best novel. It is the first of the Sprawl trilogy, a series which charts how disconnected members of a technological elite inadvertently make possible an AI (artificial intelligence) which covertly seeks to revolutionize human-machine relations. The equally compelling Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) complete the trilogy.

Gibson's real-life fear of technology-born inequality also shows itself in his fiction. Written during a robust 1980s economy which saw unprecedented economic mergers, the Sprawl trilogy resonates with a new sense of the corporation ("zaibatsu") as an indomitable Hydra: "the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory." In the Rapport interview though, Gibson reveals more real-world optimism in having "great hopes for the Internet" of individual initiative and "very little hope for commercial versions." Making a prophetic gesture before the National Academy of Sciences in May 1993 with colleague Bruce Sterling, Gibson advocated enhanced online teaching, free software to all teachers, and corporate-provided computers to only the most economically disadvantaged school districts as an equalizing move for the United States.

Hollywood brought Gibson to the silver screen with Johnny Mnemonic (1995), an adaptation of his short story published in the Nebula award-winning Burning Chrome (1987), a collection of Gibson's short fiction. The film stars Keanu Reeves as an "information-courier" whose cerebral data capacity is dangerously overloaded with information critical to an anti-technology resistance movement. Despite its often lethargic plot and juvenile characterization, the film is most successful in casting rapper Ice-T and singer Henry Rollins as prominent "Lo Teks," a band of renegade fighters which quietly undermines corporate power. The film therefore continues the idea of an "underground" use of discarded technology, established in his fiction, as the ground for resisting larger institutions.

Gibson also has written Dream Jumbo (1989), a text to accompany performance art; Agrippa, A Book of the Dead (1992), a poem about his father which was encoded on computer disk and eroded rapidly after being read; and, with novelist Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (1991), a retroactive science fiction novel set in Victorian England. Gibson's latest prose works, Virtual Light (1993) and Idoru (1996), continue the provocative vision established in the Sprawl trilogy. Although he spends no time there, the Internet is fertile with talk of Gibson and itself resonant with the implications of his work.

—Anthony Cast

Further Reading:

Trosky, Susan M., ed. Contemporary Authors. Vol. 133. Detroit, Gale Research, 1991.