4314 Crutchfield St, Richmond, VA 23225, United States
Gibson spent a few unproductive years at basketball-obsessed George Wythe High School, a time spent largely in his room listening to records and reading books.
Gibson resented the structure of the private boarding school but was in retrospect grateful for its forcing him to engage socially. On the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) exams, he scored 148 out of 150 in the written section but 5 out of 150 in mathematics, to the dismay of his teachers.
Marrying his Vancouver-born wife in 1971, Gibson moved with her back to her home town, where they both completed bachelor degrees at the University of British Columbia.
Gallery of William Gibson
Tucson, AZ 85750, United States
Gibson studied at Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson.
College/University
Gallery of William Gibson
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada
Gibson completed a bachelor's degree at the University of British Columbia.
Career
Gallery of William Gibson
1984
Canada
William Gibson in the mid-1980s.
Gallery of William Gibson
1985
Oakland, California, United States
Author William Gibson poses for a portrait circa 1985 in Oakland, California. Photo by Aaron Rapoport.
Gallery of William Gibson
1988
23 Denmark Street, London, England WC2, United Kingdom
William Gibson signing Mona Lisa Overdrive.
Gallery of William Gibson
1992
London, United Kingdom
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, science fiction writers, photographed to promote the release of the book The Difference Engine, United Kingdom, 1992. Photo by Martyn Goodacre
Gallery of William Gibson
2003
London, United Kingdom
William Gibson in April 2003 in London. Photo by Eamonn McCabe.
Gallery of William Gibson
2010
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
William Gibson in Toronto. Photo by Ron Bull.
Gallery of William Gibson
2012
Lobby Level, 100 Front St W, Toronto, ON M5J 1E3, Canada
William Gibson poses for a portrait in the Royal York's Library Bar in Toronto. Photo by Tara Walton.
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, science fiction writers, photographed to promote the release of the book The Difference Engine, United Kingdom, 1992. Photo by Martyn Goodacre
4314 Crutchfield St, Richmond, VA 23225, United States
Gibson spent a few unproductive years at basketball-obsessed George Wythe High School, a time spent largely in his room listening to records and reading books.
Gibson resented the structure of the private boarding school but was in retrospect grateful for its forcing him to engage socially. On the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) exams, he scored 148 out of 150 in the written section but 5 out of 150 in mathematics, to the dismay of his teachers.
Marrying his Vancouver-born wife in 1971, Gibson moved with her back to her home town, where they both completed bachelor degrees at the University of British Columbia.
(Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Ne...)
Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer is a science fiction masterpiece - a classic that ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most potent visions of the future. Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix - until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction. Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future - a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.
(A stylish, street smart, frighteningly probable parable o...)
A stylish, street smart, frighteningly probable parable of the future from the visionary, New York Times bestselling author of Neuromancer and Agency. A corporate mercenary wakes in a reconstructed body, a beautiful woman by his side. Then Hosaka Corporation reactivates him, for a mission more dangerous than the one he’s recovering from: to get a defecting chief of R&D - and the biochip he’s perfected - out intact. But this proves to be of supreme interest to certain other parties - some of whom aren’t remotely human.
(Best-known for his seminal sci-fi novel Neuromancer, Will...)
Best-known for his seminal sci-fi novel Neuromancer, William Gibson is actually best when writing short fiction. Tautly-written and suspenseful, Burning Chrome collects 10 of his best short stories with a preface from Bruce Sterling, now available for the first time in trade paperback. These brilliant, high-resolution stories show Gibson's characters and intensely-realized worlds at his absolute best, from the chip-enhanced couriers of "Johnny Mnemonic" to the street-tech melancholy of "Burning Chrome."
(Enter Gibson's unique world - lyric and mechanical, sensu...)
Enter Gibson's unique world - lyric and mechanical, sensual and violent, sobering and exciting - where multinational corporations and high tech outlaws vie for power, traveling into the computer-generated universe known as cyberspace. Into this world comes Mona, a young girl with a murky past and an uncertain future whose life is on a collision course with internationally famous Sense/Net star Angie Mitchell. Since childhood, Angie has been able to tap into cyberspace without a computer. Now, from inside cyberspace, a kidnapping plot is masterminded by a phantom entity who has plans for Mona, Angie, and all humanity plans that cannot be controlled or even known. And behind the intrigue lurks the shadowy Yazuka, the powerful Japanese underworld, whose leaders ruthlessly manipulate people and events to suit their own purposes or so they think.
(The millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake onl...)
The millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pickpocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich - or get you killed. Now Berry and Chevette are on the run, zeroing in on the digitalized heart of DatAmerica, where pure information is the greatest high. And a mind can be a terrible thing to crash.
(21st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain...)
21st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain. Light everywhere blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea-creature. Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the “signature” an individual creates simply by going about the business of living. But Laney knows how to sift for the dangerous bits. Which makes him useful - to certain people. Chia McKenzie is here on a rescue mission. She’s fourteen. Her idol is the singer Rez, of the band Lo/Rez. When the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club decided that he might be in trouble in Tokyo, they sent Chia to check it out. Rei Toei is the idoru - the beautiful, entirely virtual media star adored by all Japan. Rez has declared that he will marry her. This is the rumor that has brought Chia to Tokyo. True or not, the idoru and the powerful interests surrounding her are enough to put all their lives in danger.
(Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no...)
Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Tokyo; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to happen in San Francisco. The mists make it easy to hide if hiding is what you want, and even at the best of times reality, there seems to shift. A gray man moves elegantly through the mists, leaving bodies in his wake so that a tide of absences alerts Laney to his presence. A boy named Silencio does not speak but flies through webs of cyber-information in search of the one object that has seized his imagination. And Rei Toi, the Japanese Idoru, continues her study of all things human. She herself is not human, not quite, but she’s working on it. And in the mists of San Francisco, at this rare moment in history, who is to say what is or is not impossible.
(The accolades and acclaim are endless for William Gibson'...)
The accolades and acclaim are endless for William Gibson's coast-to-coast bestseller. Set in the post-9/11 present, Pattern Recognition is the story of one woman's never-ending search for the now. Cayce Pollard is a new kind of prophet - a world-renowned “coolhunter” who predicts the hottest trends. While in London to evaluate the redesign of a famous corporate logo, she’s offered a different assignment: find the creator of the obscure, enigmatic video clips being uploaded to the internet - footage that is generating massive underground buzz worldwide. Still haunted by the memory of her missing father - a Cold War security guru who disappeared in downtown Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001 - Cayce is soon traveling through parallel universes of marketing, globalization, and terror, heading always for the still point where the three converge. From London to Tokyo to Moscow, she follows the implications of a secret as disturbing - and compelling - as the twenty-first century promises to be.
(Hollis Henry is a journalist, on investigative assignment...)
Hollis Henry is a journalist, on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn’t exist yet. Bobby Chombo apparently does exist, as a producer. But in his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. And Hollis Henry has been told to find him.
(Hollis Henry never intended to work for global marketing ...)
Hollis Henry never intended to work for global marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend again. But now she’s broke, and Bigend has just the thing to get her back in the game. Milgrim can disappear in almost any setting, and his Russian is perfectly idiomatic - so much so that he spoke it with his therapist in the secret Swiss clinic where Bigend paid for him to be cured of his addiction. Garreth doesn't owe Bigend a thing. But he does have friends from whom he can call in the kinds of favors powerful people need when things go sideways. They all have something Bigend wants as he finds himself outmaneuvered and adrift, after a Department of Defense contract for combat-wear turns out to be the gateway drug for arms dealers so shadowy they can out-Bigend Bigend himself.
(Though best known for his fiction, William Gibson is as m...)
Though best known for his fiction, William Gibson is as much in demand for his cutting-edge observations on the world we live in now. Originally printed in publications as varied as Wired, the New York Times, and the Observer, these articles and essays cover thirty years of thoughtful, observant life, and are reported in the wry, humane voice that lovers of Gibson have come to crave.
(Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural Ameri...)
Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she’s trying to avoid. Her brother Burton lives on money from the Veterans Administration, for neurological damage suffered in the Marines’ elite Haptic Recon unit. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She made more as a combat scout in an online game, playing for a rich man, but she’s had to let the shooter games go. Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse. Things are pretty good now, for the haves, and there aren’t many have-nots left. Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, fancies himself a romantic misfit, in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby. Burton’s been moonlighting online, secretly working security in some game prototype, a virtual world that looks vaguely like London, but a lot weirder. He’s got Flynne taking over shifts, promised her the game’s not a shooter. Still, the crime she witnesses there is plenty bad. Flynne and Wilf are about to meet one another. Her world will be altered utterly, irrevocably, and Wilf’s, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the past can be badass.
(Science-fiction superstar William Gibson’s first graphic ...)
Science-fiction superstar William Gibson’s first graphic novel! The political leaders of 2016 have destroyed the world. Now they want a bright new reality to corrupt. To do it, they'll abuse the power of humanity's last hope: the Splitter, a colossal machine that will allow them to travel back into the past to entrench their hold on the future. With his characteristic grim sarcasm and militaristic pragmatism, Gibson leads us from the toxic environs of the present to war-torn 1945 Berlin, where RAF officer Naomi Givens will persevere against inconceivable, ruthless future forces, with the fates of epochs at stake.
(This is the official adaptation of the original screenpla...)
This is the official adaptation of the original screenplay for Alien 3, written by William Gibson, the award-winning science fiction author of the cyberpunk cult classic Neuromancer. You'll see familiar characters and places - but not all is the same in this horrifying Cold War thriller! After the deadly events of the film Aliens, the spaceship Sulaco carrying the sleeping bodies of Ripley, Hicks, Newt, and Bishop is intercepted by the Union of Progressive Peoples. What the UPP forces don't expect is another deadly passenger that is about to unleash chaos between two governmental titans intent on developing the ultimate Cold War weapon of mass destruction. Based on the original screenplay by Neuromancer's William Gibson! Adaptation and art by Johnnie Christmas - co-creator of Margaret Atwood's Angel Catbird and creator of Image Comics' Firebug. Featuring some of the most famous characters in the Alien film canon: Hicks, Bishop, Newt, and Ripley.
(This is the official adaptation of the original screenpla...)
This is the official adaptation of the original screenplay for Alien 3, written by William Gibson, the award-winning science fiction author of the cyberpunk cult classic Neuromancer. You'll see familiar characters and places - but not all is the same in this horrifying Cold War thriller! With the Sulaco containing more than meets the eye, the U.P.P. team looks to find out what happened to Ripley, Bishop, and company. At the same time, the group on the Rodina have discovered that one of their own - Kurtz - may be infected on Anchorpoint, and uses the captured Bishop as a ransoming piece for Kurtz's return, who the Rodina crew view as a potential weapon. Adaptation and art by Johnnie Christmas - co-creator of Margaret Atwood's Angel Catbird and creator of Image Comics' Firebug.
(This is the official adaptation of the original screenpla...)
This is the official adaptation of the original screenplay for Alien 3, written by William Gibson, the award-winning science fiction author of the cyberpunk cult classic Neuromancer. You'll see familiar characters and places - but not all is the same in this horrifying Cold War thriller! The crew of the Rodina quickly find themselves in a dire situation as the U.P.P. side have an unwelcome guest aboard their ship. Meanwhile, the powers that be on the Sulaco look to replace the crew with the recently recovered android, Bishop. As they push the limits of ethics and morality, the crew decides something must be done.
(This is the official adaptation of the original screenpla...)
This is the official adaptation of the original screenplay for Alien 3, written by William Gibson, the award-winning science fiction author of the cyberpunk cult classic Neuromancer. You'll see familiar characters and places - but not all is the same in this horrifying Cold War thriller!
(In this action-packed conclusion, all hell breaks loose f...)
In this action-packed conclusion, all hell breaks loose for the crew of the Sulaco as it turns out the xenomorph isn't the only monstrous threat. In a race against time, our heroes have to fight their way off the ship before they are picked off one by one. Based on the original Alien 3 screenplay by Neuromancer's William Gibson! Featuring some of the most famous characters in the Alien film canon: Hicks, Bishop, Newt, and Ripley!
(Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the bet...)
Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her cryptic new employers don’t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it’s best they don’t. Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, in a different timeline entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can’t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it.
(1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full swing, powered...)
1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine, and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time. Three extraordinary characters race toward a rendezvous with the future: Sybil Gerard - fallen woman, politician’s tart, daughter of a Luddite agitator; Edward “Leviathan” Mallory - explorer and paleontologist; Laurence Oliphant - diplomat, mystic, and spy. Their adventure begins with the discovery of a box of punched Engine cards of unknown origin and purpose. Cards someone wants badly enough to kill for. Part detective story, part historical thriller, The Difference Engine took the science fiction community by storm when it was first published twenty years ago. This special anniversary edition features an Introduction by Cory Doctorow and a collaborative essay from the authors looking back on their creation. Provocative, compelling, intensely imagined, this novel is poised to impress a whole new generation.
William Gibson, in full William Ford Gibson, is an American-Canadian writer of science fiction. He works as a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. He was the leader of the genre’s cyberpunk movement.
Background
William Ford Gibson was born on March 17, 1948, in Conway, South Carolina, United States to the family of a contractor William Ford Gibson and a homemaker Otey Williams.
William Gibson spent most of his childhood in the small town of Wytheville, Virginia, a small town in the Appalachians where his parents had been born and raised. As a child, he spent much time traveling due to his father's construction jobs. His father choked to death in a restaurant while on a business trip when Gibson was eight years old. His mother, unable to tell him the bad news, had someone else inform him of the death. She died in 1965 when Gibson was a teenager at a boarding school in Tucson, Arizona. At thirteen he was first acquainted with science fiction through reading traditional science fiction writers such as Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon. In his later teens and twenties, he came across experimental science fiction in the writings of William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, and J.G. Ballard.
In 1968, susceptible to the draft to Vietnam, Gibson began traveling in Europe and Canada. After a period in Toronto, he settled in Vancouver in 1972.
Education
In Norfolk, Virginia, Gibson attended Pines Elementary School, where the teachers' lack of encouragement for him to read was a cause of dismay for his parents. He spent a few unproductive years at basketball-obsessed George Wythe High School, a time spent largely in his room listening to records and reading books. Becoming frustrated with his poor academic performance, Gibson's mother threatened to send him to a boarding school; to her surprise, he reacted enthusiastically. Unable to afford his preferred choice of Southern California, his then "chronically anxious and depressive" mother, who had remained in Wytheville since the death of her husband, sent him to Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson.
Gibson resented the structure of the private boarding school but was in retrospect grateful for its forcing him to engage socially. On the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) exams, he scored 148 out of 150 in the written section but 5 out of 150 in mathematics, to the dismay of his teachers.
Marrying his Vancouver-born wife in 1971, Gibson moved with her back to her home town, where they both completed bachelor degrees at the University of British Columbia. Here he attended his first course on science fiction, organized by Professor Susan Wood, an active researcher in the field of fantasy, science fiction, and Canadian literature.
At the end of this course, Gibson was encouraged to write his first short story, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose”, which is now collected in Burning Chrome and Other Stories (1986). This was first published in UnEarth, a short-lived science fiction magazine, in 1977. This publication was followed by a number of other stories that appeared in science fiction magazines such as Omni, Universe 11, and Shadows 4. All the short stories and collaborative pieces he wrote with other cyberpunks - Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Michael Swanwick - between 1977 and 1986 are included in the Burning Chrome collection with a preface written by Sterling.
Gibson worked at various jobs but for three years he was employed as a teaching assistant on a film history course at the University of British Columbia. When his children were born he decided to stay at home to care for them, and it was then that he started writing again. He chose to return to science fiction and wished, through his writing, to renovate a genre that many people considered insignificant. Terry Carr, the editor of the Ace Science Fiction Specials series, was looking for new science fiction writers who would rejuvenate his series. He approached Gibson, who set about writing.
Many of Gibson’s early stories, including Johnny Mnemonic (1981; film 1995) and Burning Chrome (1982), were published in Omni magazine. With the publication of his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), Gibson emerged as a leading exponent of cyberpunk, a new school of science-fiction writing. Cyberpunk combines a cynical, tough “punk” sensibility with futuristic cybernetic (i.e., having to do with communication and control theory) technology. Gibson’s creation of “cyberspace,” a computer-simulated reality that shows the nature of information, foreshadowed virtual reality technology and is considered the author’s major contribution to the genre.
Neuromancer, which won three major science-fiction awards (Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick), established Gibson’s reputation. Its protagonist is a 22nd-century data thief who fights against the domination of a corporate-controlled society by breaking through the global computer network’s cyberspace matrix. Count Zero (1986) was set in the same world as Neuromancer but seven years later. The characters of Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) can “die” into computers, where they may support or sabotage outer reality. After collaborating with writer Bruce Sterling on The Difference Engine (1990), a story set in Victorian England, Gibson returned to the subject of cyberspace in Virtual Light (1993).
Gibson’s Idoru (1996), set in 21st-century Tokyo, focuses on the media and virtual celebrities of the future. All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999) concerns a clairvoyant cyberpunk who labors to keep a villain from dominating the world. Pattern Recognition (2003) follows a marketing consultant who is hired to track down the origins of a mysterious Internet video. In Spook Country (2007), characters navigate a world filled with spies, ghosts, and other nefarious unseen agents. Zero History (2010), which completed a trilogy that includes his previous two novels, reveals hidden governmental conspiracies through a search for a missing fashion designer. The Peripheral (2014) investigates the possibility of communication with future societies by way of computer technology.
William Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, won the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award in 1984. He is also the New York Times bestselling author of Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and The Peripheral.
(Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Ne...)
1984
Religion
William Gibson is a non-religious person since his high school years.
Politics
William Gibson is rather sceptical about the unrestricted capitalism.
Views
William Gibson s sometimes rendered as a great prophet of the digital future, who not only coined the word 'cyberspace' in his debut novel Neuromancer in 1984 but imagined its implications and went a long way to suggesting its YouTube and MySpace culture.
As the Internet became more accessible, Gibson discovered that he wasn’t terribly interested in spending time online himself. He was fascinated, though, by the people who did. They seemed to him to grow hungrier for the Web the more of it they consumed.
Instead of fantasizing about virtual worlds, Gibson inspected the real one. Futurists he knew had begun talking about “the Singularity” - the moment when humanity is transformed completely by technology. Gibson didn’t buy it; he aimed to represent a “half-assed Singularity” - a world-transforming dramatically but haphazardly.
Quotations:
"The future is already here. It is just not evenly distributed."
"I didn't imagine that art girls in the Midwest would be flashing their tits in cyberspace... but I'm glad that they're doing it."
"The NET is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it."
"The future is not google-able."
"This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work."
"On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision."
"The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive."
"Before diagnosing yourself with depression or low self-esteem, make sure that you are not in fact surrounded by assholes."
"I'm agnostic about technology. But I want a robotic penguin."
"Sweetest irony is that today's Russian Program is the result of astute Marxist analysis: Remove all brakes from capitalism and capitalist democracy crashes itself."
Personality
A shy, ungainly as a teenager, Gibson grew up in a monoculture he found "highly problematic", and took refuge in reading science fiction as well as writers such as Burroughs and Henry Miller.
Physical Characteristics:
Bald and skinny, six feet five but for a slight stoop, Gibson dresses almost exclusively in a mixture of futuristic techwear and mid-twentieth-century American clothing reproduced by companies in Japan.
Interests
Writers
Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, James Graham Ballard, Jack Kerouac
Music & Bands
Joy Division
Connections
William Gibson married Deborah Jean Thompson in June 1972. They have two children, Graeme Ford and Claire Thompson.
