William Gibson. Spook Country promotional tour, San Francisco, CA. August 2007. Uploaded by Flickr user Frédéric Poirot.
(1948 - ) Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina. Gibson grew up in southwestern Virginia. After dropping out of high school in 1967, he traveled to Canada and eventually settled there, earning a B.A. (1977) from the University of British Columbia.
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, Gibson emerged as a leading exponent of cyberpunk, a new school of science-fiction writing. Cyberpunk combines a cynical, tough “punk” sensibility with futuristic 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.
