William Gibson (1948– ) is a highly influential US-Canadian science fiction novelist and essayist who has been called the “noir prophet” of cyberpunk; critics credit Gibson with creating the term cyberspace in his 1982 story “Burning Chrome,” and The Guardian has called him “probably the most important novelist of the past two decades.” His first novel, Neuromancer (1984), had a revolutionary effect on science fiction, expanding upon the themes in his short stories. The first line of Neuromancer—“The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel”—has become as memorable as Thomas Pynchon’s “A screaming comes across the sky” from Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Gibson’s more recent bestselling novels—Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), Zero History (2010), and The Peripheral (2014)—are set in a version of our reality, although The Peripheral in particular has speculative elements. The later novels tend to tackle the inequities of the information age in the context of capitalism and computer technology.
Gibson’s father died when he was six, his mother when he was eighteen. His father worked in middle management for a construction company in South Carolina. “They’d built some of the Oak Ridge atomic facilities, and paranoic legends of ‘security’ at Oak Ridge were part of our family culture,” Gibson wrote in his short biographical essay “Since 1948.” The world Gibson grew up in was one “of early television, a new Oldsmobile with crazy rocket-ship styling, toys with science fiction themes.”
Later, Gibson stumbled upon “a writer named Burroughs—not Edgar Rice but William S.” Gibson read Kerouac and Ginsberg soon thereafter, making him, as he puts it, “Patient Zero of what would later become the counterculture.”
Gibson’s short fiction is quite diverse and includes work that could be classified as horror or fantasy or cross-genre. “New Rose Hotel,” which appeared in Omni in 1984, is classic cyberpunk, and in many ways a more interesting story than the iconic “Burning Chrome.”