William Gibson (novelist)

From Wikinfo

Image:WilliamGibson.jpg William Ford Gibson (March 17, 1948, Conway, South Carolina) is an American-born Canadian science fiction author. He has been called the father of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. He is credited with coining the term "cyberspace." His first novel, Neuromancer, has sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide since its publication in 1984. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Quotes 3 Bibliography 3.1 Novels 3.2 Collections 3.3 Uncollected short fiction 3.4 Magazine articles 3.5 Miscellaneous other work 4 External links 4.1 References

Biography

In 1968, Gibson went to Canada to avoid the Vietnam war draft in the US. In 1972, he settled in Vancouver and began to write science fiction. Since then, he has spent most of his adult life there.

His early writings are generally futuristic stories about the influences of cybernetics and cyberspace (computer-simulated reality) technology on the human race. His themes of hi-tech shantytowns appear in Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977). In the '80s, his fiction developed a film noir, bleak feel; short stories appearing in Omni began to develop the themes he expanded into his first novel, Neuromancer. Neuromancer was the first novel to win all three major science fiction awards: the Nebula, the Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Memorial Award.

The novels rounding out his first trilogy - commonly known as the "Sprawl trilogy" - are Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Gibson's second trilogy, the "Bridge trilogy", centers on San Francisco in the near future and evinces Gibson's recurring themes of technological, physical, and spiritual transcendence in an arguably more grounded, matter-of-fact style than his first trilogy. The books in this trilogy are titled Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties.

After All Tommorrow's Parties, Gibson has begun to adopt a more realist style of writing, with continuous narratives. His novel Pattern Recognition, set in the present day, entered mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.

In 1992, Gibson wrote Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), an electronic poem. It was about the ethereal nature of memories (the title refers to a photo album), for an artist's book collaboration with painter Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos. The book included a self-erasing floppy disk intended to display the text only once, then "eat itself" after being read (Gibson quote from his weblog). The poem has since found its way onto the Internet. He commenced writing a weblog in early 2003, which remains active, with one major hiatus, into 2006. Gibson also wrote a treatment of [[Alien�]], few elements of which found their way into the film.

Two of his short stories have been turned into movies: 1995's Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves, and 1998's New Rose Hotel, starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, and Asia Argento. Gibson, together with his friend Tom Maddox, wrote the X-Files episodes "Kill Switch" and "First Person Shooter" and made a cameo appearance in the former. Gibson also made a cameo appearance in the miniseries Wild Palms. Gibson's article on fellow cyberpunk and occasional collaborator John Shirley can be read here.

Gibson was the focus of a 1999 documentary by Mark Neale called No Maps for These Territories, featuring Bono and The Edge reading excerpts from Neuromancer.

Despite all this, Gibson never had a special relationship with computers.

Quotes

I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here. -- excerpt from short autobiography on Gibson's website, williamgibsonbooks.com

Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes. -- from a talk given at the Directors Guild of America's Digital Day, Los Angeles, May 17, 2003.

"...I felt that I was trying to describe an unthinkable present and I actually feel that science fiction's best use today is the exploration of contemporary reality rather than any attempt to predict where we are going... The best thing you can do with science today is use it to explore the present. Earth is the alien planet now." --from an interview on CNNfn, August 26, 1997.

Bibliography

Novels

• Neuromancer (1984) (part 1 of the Sprawl Trilogy)
• Count Zero (1986) (part 2 of the Sprawl Trilogy)
• Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) (part 3 of the Sprawl Trilogy)
• The Difference Engine (1990) (with M. Bruce Sterling)
• Virtual Light (1993) (part 1 of the Bridge Trilogy)
• Idoru (1996) (part 2 of the Bridge Trilogy)
• All Tomorrow's Parties (1999) (part 3 of the Bridge Trilogy)
• Pattern Recognition (2003)

Collections

• Burning Chrome (1986), which includes:
  • "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" (1977, UnEarth 3)
  • "Johnny Mnemonic" (1981, Omni)
  • "The Gernsback Continuum" (1981, Universe II)
  • "Hinterlands (1981, Omni)
  • "New Rose Hotel" (1981, Omni)
  • "The Belonging Kind", with John Shirley (1981, Shadows 4)
  • "Burning Chrome" (1982, Omni)
  • "Red Star, Winter Orbit", with Bruce Sterling (1983, Omni)
  • "The Winter Market" (1985)
  • "Dogfight", with Michael Swanwick (1985, Omni)

Uncollected short fiction

• "Doing Television" (1990)
• "Skinner's Room" (1990)
• "Cyber-Claus" (1991)
• "Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City" (1997)
• "Hippy Hat Brain Parasite"

Magazine articles

• Disneyland With The Death Penalty (1993), Wired Magazine, 1.04
• My Obsession (1999), Wired Magazine, 7.01
• William Gibson's Filmless Festival (1999), Wired Magazine, 7.10
• My Own Private Tokyo (2001), Wired Magazine, 9.09
• God's Little Toys (2005), Wired Magazine, 13.7
• U2's City of Blinding Lights (2005), Wired Magazine, 13.8

Miscellaneous other work

• Agrippa: A Book of The Dead (1992)
• The Art of the X-Files, Introduction (1998)

External links

• William Gibson's website
• Archive of William Gibson's weblog
• Literary Encyclopedia
• Project Cyberpunk
• William Gibson Aleph An extensive fan site
• Another fan site
• William Gibson at the Internet Movie Database
• William Gibson at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Patternhunter blog inspired by Gibson's concept of "nodal points"
• Video interview with Gibson from 1967
• Audio interview at CBC Bookclub (1hr) from 2003
• Streaming audio interview (20min) from 2003
• Tech Nation Interview (20 minute mp3)
• Spike Magazine Interview
• Director's Statement by Mark Neale on working on 'No Maps for These Territories
• The Agrippa Files: an online archive of (a book of the dead)[[sv:William Gibson (f�rfattare)]][[zh:??�???]]

References

• Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "William_Gibson_(novelist)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson_(novelist), used under the GNU Free Documentation License