55 Facts About William Gibson

William Ford Gibson was born on March 17,1948 and is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk.

William Gibson's work has been cited as influencing a variety of disciplines: academia, design, film, literature, music, cyberculture, and technology.

William Ford Gibson was born in the coastal city of Conway, South Carolina, and he spent most of his childhood in Wytheville, Virginia, a small town in the Appalachians where his parents had been born and raised.

William Gibson's family moved frequently during Gibson's youth owing to his father's position as manager of a large construction company.

Tom Maddox has commented that Gibson "grew up in an America as disturbing and surreal as anything J G Ballard ever dreamed".

William Gibson later described Wytheville as "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted" and credits the beginnings of his relationship with science fiction, his "native literary culture", with the subsequent feeling of abrupt exile.

At the age of 12, William Gibson "wanted nothing more than to be a science fiction writer".

William 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.

William Gibson resented the structure of the private boarding school but was in retrospect grateful for its forcing him to engage socially.

William Gibson has observed that he "did not literally evade the draft, as they never bothered drafting me"; after the hearing he went home, purchased a bus ticket to Toronto, and left a week or two later.

William Gibson elaborated on the topic in a 2008 interview:.

William Gibson found the city's emigre community of American draft dodgers unbearable owing to the prevalence of clinical depression, suicide, and hardcore substance abuse.

William Gibson spent a "brief, riot-torn spell" in the District of Columbia where he completed his high school diploma at the age of 21.

William Gibson spent the rest of the 1960s in Toronto, where he met Vancouverite Deborah Jean Thompson, with whom he subsequently traveled to Europe.

William Gibson has recounted that they concentrated their travels on European nations with fascist regimes and favorable exchange rates, including spending time on a Greek archipelago and in Istanbul in 1970, as they "couldn't afford to stay anywhere that had anything remotely like hard currency".

The couple married and settled in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1972, with William Gibson looking after their first child while they lived off his wife's teaching salary.

Impatient at much of what he saw at a science fiction convention in Vancouver in 1980 or 1981, William Gibson found a kindred spirit in fellow panelist, punk musician and author John Shirley.

Shirley persuaded William Gibson to sell his early short stories and to take writing seriously.

In October 1982, William Gibson traveled to Austin, Texas, for ArmadilloCon, at which he appeared with Shirley, Sterling and Shiner on a panel called "Behind the Mirrorshades: A Look at Punk SF", where Shiner noted "the sense of a movement solidified".

The themes which William Gibson developed in the stories, the Sprawl setting of "Burning Chrome" and the character of Molly Millions from "Johnny Mnemonic" ultimately culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer.

William Gibson next intended to write an unrelated postmodern space opera, titled The Log of the Mustang Sally, but reneged on the contract with Arbor House after a falling out over the dustjacket art of their hardcover of Count Zero.

The Sprawl trilogy was followed by the 1990 novel The Difference Engine, an alternative history novel William Gibson wrote in collaboration with Bruce Sterling.

The first and third books in the trilogy center on San Francisco in the near future; all three explore William Gibson's recurring themes of technological, physical, and spiritual transcendence in a more grounded, matter-of-fact style than his first trilogy.

At a later date, William Gibson stated that he did not name his trilogies, "I wait to see what people call them," and has in 2016 used "the Blue Ant books" in a tweet.

The Peripheral, the first in a new series of novels by William Gibson, was released on October 28,2014.

William Gibson said in a New Yorker magazine article that both the election of Donald Trump as US President and the controversy over Cambridge Analytica had caused him to rethink and revise the text.

William Gibson had previously written the foreword to Shirley's 1980 novel City Come A-walkin and the pair's collaboration continued when William Gibson wrote the introduction to Shirley's short story collection Heatseeker.

Shirley convinced William Gibson to write a story for the television series Max Headroom for which Shirley had written several scripts, but the network canceled the series.

In 1993, William Gibson contributed lyrics and featured as a guest vocalist on Yellow Magic Orchestra's Technodon album, and wrote lyrics to the track "Dog Star Girl" for Deborah Harry's Debravation.

William Gibson was first solicited to work as a screenwriter after a film producer discovered a waterlogged copy of Neuromancer on a beach at a Thai resort.

In 2019, Audible released an audio drama of William Gibson's script, adapted by Dirk Maggs and with Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen reprising their roles.

Adaptations of William Gibson's fiction have frequently been optioned and proposed, to limited success.

Two of the author's short stories, both set in the Sprawl trilogy universe, have been loosely adapted as films: Johnny Mnemonic with screenplay by William Gibson and starring Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren and Takeshi Kitano, and New Rose Hotel, starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, and Asia Argento.

Television is another arena in which William Gibson has collaborated; with friend Tom Maddox, he co-wrote The X-Files episodes "Kill Switch" and "First Person Shooter", broadcast in 1998 and 2000.

William Gibson made a cameo appearance in the television miniseries Wild Palms at the behest of creator Bruce Wagner.

William Gibson accepted another acting role in 2002, appearing alongside Douglas Coupland in the short film Mon Amour Mon Parapluie in which the pair played philosophers.

Appearances in fiction aside, William Gibson was the focus of a biographical documentary by Mark Neale in 2000 called No Maps for These Territories.

William Gibson has contributed text to be integrated into a number of performance art pieces.

In October 1989, William Gibson wrote text for such a collaboration with acclaimed sculptor and future Johnny Mnemonic director Robert Longo titled Dream Jumbo: Working the Absolutes, which was displayed in Royce Hall, University of California Los Angeles.

Three years later, William Gibson contributed original text to "Memory Palace", a performance show featuring the theater group La Fura dels Baus at Art Futura '92, Barcelona, which featured images by Karl Sims, Rebecca Allen, Mark Pellington with music by Peter Gabriel and others.

In 1990, William Gibson contributed to "Visionary San Francisco", an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shown from June 14 to August 26.

William Gibson is a sporadic contributor of non-fiction articles to newspapers and journals.

William Gibson has occasionally contributed longer-form articles to Wired and of op-eds to The New York Times, and has written for The Observer, Addicted to Noise, New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Details Magazine.

William Gibson commenced writing a blog in January 2003, providing voyeuristic insights into his reaction to Pattern Recognition, but abated in September of the same year owing to concerns that it might negatively affect his creative process.

In 2012, William Gibson released a collection of his non-fiction works entitled Distrust That Particular Flavor.

William Gibson's work has influenced several popular musicians: references to his fiction appear in the music of Stuart Hamm, Billy Idol, Warren Zevon, Deltron 3030, Straylight Run and Sonic Youth.

William Gibson returned the favour by writing an article about the band's Vertigo Tour for Wired in August 2005.

William Gibson was inducted by Science Fiction Hall of Fame that same year, presented by his close friend and collaborator Jack Womack.

In Neuromancer, William Gibson first used the term "matrix" to refer to the visualized Internet, two years after the nascent modern Internet was formed in the early 1980s from the computer networks of the 1970s.

William Gibson thereby imagined a worldwide communications network years before the origin of the World Wide Web, although related notions had previously been imagined by others, including science fiction writers.

Steven Poole claims that in writing the Sprawl trilogy William Gibson laid the "conceptual foundations for the explosive real-world growth of virtual environments in video games and the Web".

William Gibson's vision, generated by the monopolising appearance of the terminal image and presented in his creation of the cyberspace matrix, came to him when he saw teenagers playing in video arcades.

However, William Gibson later disputed the notion that the creators of lonelygirl15 drew influence from him.

William Gibson similarly did not play computer games despite appearing in his stories.

William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a 1927 olive-green Hermes portable typewriter, which Gibson described as "the kind of thing Hemingway would have used in the field".