William Gibson (1948 – )

He is one of the leading members of the cyberpunk movement.

Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina, USA. In 1968, he moved to Canada, 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 (computer simulated reality) 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).

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 favour 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 the focus on technological change, and in particular on its darker, less predictable social consequences.

In addition to his paper works, he also wrote an electronic poem called "Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)" in 1992, and flirted with writing a weblog from January to September 2003. Gibson had also written a highly anticipated treatment of Alien 3, few elements of which ever found their way into the ultimate film.

Despite all these, Gibson never had a special relationship with computers. In fact, he only recently started using e-mail.