"William Gibson William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a ""combination of lowlife and high tech""—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson notably coined the term ""cyberspace"" in his short story ""Burning Chrome"" (1982) and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed"
"Through his novels, such terms as ""cyberspace"", ""netsurfing"", ""ICE"", ""jacking in"", and ""neural implants"" entered popular usage, as did concepts such as net consciousness, virtual interaction and ""the matrix"". In ""Burning Chrome"" (1982), he coined the term ""cyberspace"", referring to the ""mass consensual hallucination"" of computer networks. Through its use in ""Neuromancer"", the term gained such recognition that it became the ""de facto"" term for the World Wide Web during the 1990s. Artist Dike Blair has commented that Gibson's ""terse descriptive phrases capture the moods which surround technologies, rather than their engineering."" Gibson's work has influenced several popular musicians: references"
"Neuromancer Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. It is one of the best-known works in the cyberpunk genre and the first novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. Set in the future, the novel follows Henry Case, a washed-up computer hacker, who is hired by the mysterious master criminal Armitage and the equally mysterious mercenary cyborg Molly Millions for one last job: to help a powerful artificial intelligence merge with its twin into a"
"Simon Kinberg producing. Neuromancer Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. It is one of the best-known works in the cyberpunk genre and the first novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. Set in the future, the novel follows Henry Case, a washed-up computer hacker, who is hired by the mysterious master criminal Armitage and the equally mysterious mercenary cyborg Molly Millions for one last job: to help a powerful artificial intelligence merge with its"
"Ivrel"" and ""Brothers of Earth"", which began her Alliance-Union universe future history series. In 1979 ""Science Fiction World"" began publication in the People's Republic of China. It dominates the Chinese science fiction magazine market, at one time claiming a circulation of 300,000 copies per issue, with an estimate of 3-5 readers per copy (giving it a total readership of at least 1 million) making it the world's most popular science fiction periodical. In 1984 William Gibson’s first novel ""Neuromancer"" helped popularize cyberpunk, and the word ""cyberspace"" -- a term he coined in his 1982 short story ""Burning Chrome"". In 1986"
"from human control. Critics have identified marked similarities between ""Neuromancer"" and the film's cinematography and tone. In spite of his initial reticence about seeing the film on its release, Gibson later described it as ""arguably the ultimate 'cyberpunk' artifact."" In 2008 he received honorary doctorates from Simon Fraser University and Coastal Carolina University. In ""Neuromancer"", Gibson first used the term ""matrix"" to refer to the visualized Internet, two years after the nascent Internet was formed in the early 1980s from the computer networks of the 1970s. Gibson thereby imagined a worldwide communications network years before the origin of the World"
"with his novel ""Neuromancer"" (1984) is arguably the most famous writer connected with the term cyberpunk. He emphasized style, a fascination with surfaces, and atmosphere over traditional science-fiction tropes. Regarded as ground-breaking and sometimes as ""the archetypal cyberpunk work,"" ""Neuromancer"" was awarded the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards. ""Count Zero"" (1986) and ""Mona Lisa Overdrive"" (1988) followed after Gibson's popular debut novel. According to the Jargon File, ""Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since found both"
"""[w]hat if the act of writing it down, in fact, ""brought it about?"""" (269). Norman Spinrad, in his 1986 essay ""The Neuromantics"" which appears in his non-fiction collection ""Science Fiction in the Real World"", saw the book's title as a triple pun: ""neuro"" referring to the nervous system; ""necromancer""; and ""new romancer"". The cyberpunk genre, the authors of which he suggested be called ""neuromantics"", was ""a fusion of the romantic impulse with science and technology"", according to Spinrad. Writing in ""F&SF"" in 2005, Charles de Lint noted that while Gibson's technological extrapolations had proved imperfect (in particular, his failure to"
"of the nation state. Observers contend that Gibson's influence on the development of the Web reached beyond prediction; he is widely credited with creating an iconography for the information age, long before the embrace of the Internet by the mainstream. Gibson introduced, in ""Neuromancer"", the notion of the ""meatpuppet"", and is credited with inventing—conceptually rather than participatorally—the phenomenon of virtual sex. His influence on early pioneers of desktop environment digital art has been acknowledged, and he holds an honorary doctorate from Parsons The New School for Design. Steven Poole claims that in writing the Sprawl trilogy Gibson laid the ""conceptual"
"Wide Web, although related notions had previously been imagined by others, including science fiction writers. At the time he wrote ""Burning Chrome"", Gibson ""had a hunch that [the Internet] would change things, in the same way that the ubiquity of the automobile changed things."" In 1995, he identified the advent, evolution and growth of the Internet as ""one of the most fascinating and unprecedented human achievements of the century"", a new kind of civilization that is – in terms of significance — on a par with the birth of cities, and in 2000 predicted it would lead to the death"
"in this age of CYBERNATION."" By the 1970s, the Control Data Corporation (CDC) sold the ""Cyber"" range of supercomputers, establishing the word ""cyber-"" as synonymous with computing. Robert Trappl credits William Gibson and his novel ""Neuromancer"" with triggering a ""cyber- prefix flood"" in the 1980s. McFedries observes that a backlash against the use of ""e-"" and ""cyber-"" can be traced to the late 1990s, quoting Hale and Scanlon requesting writers in 1999 to ""resist the urge to use this vowel-as-cliché"" when it comes to ""e-"" and calling ""cyber-"" ""terminally overused."" Internet-related prefixes Internet-related prefixes such as ""e-"", ""i-"", ""cyber-"", ""info-"","
"science fiction. William Gibson's ""Neuromancer"", published in 1984, announced the cyberpunk movement to the larger literary world and was a tremendous commercial success. Other key writers in the movement included Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, and later Neal Stephenson. Though Cyberpunk would later be cross-pollinated with other styles of science fiction, there seemed to be some notion of ideological purity in the beginning. John Shirley compared the Cyberpunk movement to a tribe. During the 1980s, a large number of cyberpunk manga and anime works were produced in Japan, the most notable being the 1982 manga ""Akira"" and its 1988 anime film"
"theme. In the 1981 BBC serial ""The Nightmare Man"" the pilot of a high-tech mini submarine is linked to his craft via a brain implant but becomes a savage killer after ripping out the implant. Perhaps the most influential novel exploring the world of brain implants was William Gibson's 1984 novel ""Neuromancer"". This was the first novel in a genre that came to be known as ""cyberpunk"". It follows a computer hacker through a world where mercenaries are augmented with brain implants to enhance strength, vision, memory, etc. Gibson coins the term ""matrix"" and introduces the concept of ""jacking in"""
"cybernetics was applied in healthcare as a means of setting positive outcome goals for patients who were not satisfied with their plastic surgeries. The emergence of ""new cybernetics"" or ""second-order cybernetics"" further expanded this concept to include the interactions between cybernetic systems and the people interacting with them, as well as to society as a whole. Cybernetics also includes the concept of ""cyberspace"", which is described by the science fiction author William Gibson as a virtual representation of information in varying states of accessibility that is linked to various people and organizations in his book Neuromancer. This concept is also"
"of words, one for technology, one for troublemakers, and experimented with combining them variously into compound words, consciously attempting to coin a term that encompassed both punk attitudes and high technology. He described the idea thus: Afterward, Dozois began using this term in his own writing, most notably in a ""Washington Post"" article where he said ""About the closest thing here to a self-willed esthetic “school” would be the purveyors of bizarre hard-edged, high-tech stuff, who have on occasion been referred to as “cyberpunks” — Sterling, Gibson, Shiner, Cadigan, Bear."" About that time, William Gibson's novel ""Neuromancer"" was published, delivering"
"literalized and mechanized ... multi-national information systems mutate and breed into startling new structures whose beauty and complexity are unimaginable, mystical, and above all nonhuman."" Gibson later commented on himself as an author, circa ""Neuromancer"", that ""I'd buy him a drink, but I don't know if I'd loan him any money,"" and referred to the novel as ""an adolescent's book"". The success of ""Neuromancer"" was to effect the 35-year-old Gibson's emergence from obscurity. Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained rooted in ""Neuromancer"", his work continued to evolve conceptually and stylistically. Despite adding the final sentence of ""Neuromancer"", ""He never"
"knowledge. Despite the lack of face to face contact and impaired social linking, learning efficiency may not be adversely affected as adults need autonomy in learning and are more self-directed than younger students. Some companies and public places allow free virtual access to their facilities as an alternative to a video or picture. Virtual worlds, virtual reality, and cyberspace are popular fictional motifs. A prominent example is the work of William Gibson. The first was probably John M. Ford's 1980 novel ""Web of Angels"". Virtual worlds are integral to ""Tron"", ""Neuromancer"", ""Ghost in the Shell"", ""Snow Crash"", ""The Lawnmower Man"","
"by science fiction. John Brunner's 1975 novel ""The Shockwave Rider"" is notable for coining the word ""worm"" to describe a computer program that propagates itself through a computer network, used as a weapon in the novel. William Gibson's ""Neuromancer"" coined the phrase cyberspace, a virtual battleground in which battles are fought using software weapons and counterweapons. The ""Star Trek"" episode A Taste of Armageddon is another notable example. Certain Dale Brown novels place cyberweapons in different roles. The first is the ""netrusion"" technology used by the U.S. Air Force. It sends corrupt data to oncoming missiles to shut them down,"
"the implications of what he termed ""phantomatics"" in his nonfictional 1964 treatise ""Summa Technologiae"". A number of other popular fictional works use the concept of virtual reality. These include William Gibson's 1984 ""Neuromancer"", which defined the concept of cyberspace, and his 1994 ""Virtual Light"", where a presentation viewable in VR-like goggles was the MacGuffin. Other examples are Neal Stephenson's ""Snow Crash"", in which he made extensive reference to the term avatar to describe one's representation in a virtual world, and Rudy Rucker's ""The Hacker and the Ants"", in which a programmer uses VR for robot design and testing. The ""Otherland"""
"published by Simon and Schuster, 1978. An innovator in new media during the early 1980s, Berry is credited with the first digitally painted book cover, in his cover for the cyberpunk novel ""Neuromancer"", by William Gibson. Published in 1985, this cover was commissioned when it became clear that ""Neuromancer"" would sweep the awards after its initial publication in 1984 and remained the novel's cover for almost two decades. Berry created the painting with assistance from hackers at MIT's Machine Architectural Group. Like William Gibson, Berry purchased his first computer from the proceeds of Neuromancer. He immediately began experimenting with it"
"he'd done some really interesting stuff with a laptop and payphones and that cracked it for me, because it made it cinematic"". The character Eugene Belford uses Babbage as a pseudonym at the end of the film, a reference to Charles Babbage, an inventor of an early form of the computer. The fictional computer mainframe named the ""Gibson"" is a homage to cyberpunk author William Gibson and originator of the term ""Cyberspace"", first in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome and later in his 1984 book Neuromancer. The cast spent three weeks getting to know each other and learning how"
"awards, including: Sprawl trilogy The Sprawl trilogy (also known as the Neuromancer, Cyberspace, or Matrix trilogy) is William Gibson's first set of novels, composed of ""Neuromancer"" (1984), ""Count Zero"" (1986), and ""Mona Lisa Overdrive"" (1988). The novels are all set in the same fictional future, and are subtly interlinked by shared characters and themes (which are not always readily apparent). The Sprawl trilogy shares this setting with Gibson's short stories ""Johnny Mnemonic"", ""New Rose Hotel"", and ""Burning Chrome"", and events and characters from the stories appear in or are mentioned at points in the trilogy. The novels are set in"
"Sprawl trilogy The Sprawl trilogy (also known as the Neuromancer, Cyberspace, or Matrix trilogy) is William Gibson's first set of novels, composed of ""Neuromancer"" (1984), ""Count Zero"" (1986), and ""Mona Lisa Overdrive"" (1988). The novels are all set in the same fictional future, and are subtly interlinked by shared characters and themes (which are not always readily apparent). The Sprawl trilogy shares this setting with Gibson's short stories ""Johnny Mnemonic"", ""New Rose Hotel"", and ""Burning Chrome"", and events and characters from the stories appear in or are mentioned at points in the trilogy. The novels are set in a near-future"
"achieved critical recognition with his debut novel, ""Neuromancer"". The novel won three major science fiction awards (the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award), an unprecedented achievement described by the ""Mail & Guardian"" as ""the sci-fi writer's version of winning the Goncourt, Booker and Pulitzer prizes in the same year"". ""Neuromancer"" gained unprecedented critical and popular attention outside science fiction, as an ""evocation of life in the late 1980s"", although ""The Observer"" noted that ""it took the ""New York Times"" 10 years"" to mention the novel. Gibson's work has received international attention from an audience that"
"is literalized and mechanized... multi-national information systems mutate and breed into startling new structures whose beauty and complexity are unimaginable, mystical, and above all nonhuman."" Gibson later commented on himself as an author circa ""Neuromancer"" that ""I'd buy him a drink, but I don't know if I'd loan him any money,"" and referred to the novel as ""an adolescent's book"". The success of ""Neuromancer"" was to effect the 35-year-old Gibson's emergence from obscurity. In 1989, Epic Comics published a 48-page graphic novel version by Tom de Haven and Bruce Jensen. It only covers the first two chapters, ""Chiba City Blues"""
"as ""one of North America's most highly acclaimed science fiction writers"". In his early short fiction, Gibson is credited by Rapatzikou in ""The Literary Encyclopedia"" with effectively ""renovating"" science fiction, a genre at that time considered widely ""insignificant"", influencing by means of the postmodern aesthetic of his writing the development of new perspectives in science fiction studies. In the words of filmmaker Marianne Trench, Gibson's visions ""struck sparks in the real world"" and ""determined the way people thought and talked"" to an extent unprecedented in science fiction literature. The publication of ""Neuromancer"" (1984) hit a cultural nerve, causing Larry McCaffery"
"was eight years old. . Several track names on Hamm's ""Kings of Sleep"" album (""Black Ice"", ""Count Zero"", ""Kings of Sleep"") reference Gibson's work. . Idol released an album in 1993 titled ""Cyberpunk"", which featured a track named ""Neuromancer"". Robert Christgau excoriated Idol's treatment of cyberpunk, and Gibson later stated that Idol had ""turned it into something very silly."" . Zevon's 1989 album ""Transverse City"" was inspired by Gibson's fiction. . Gibson later successfully resisted attempts by Autodesk to copyright the word for their abortive foray into virtual reality. . Both the Internet with its dramatic social effects and the"
"a glimpse of a future encompassed by what became an archetype of cyberpunk ""virtual reality"", with the human mind being fed light-based worldscapes through a computer interface. Some, perhaps ironically including Bethke himself, argued at the time that the writers whose style Gibson's books epitomized should be called ""Neuromantics"", a pun on the name of the novel plus ""New Romantics"", a term used for a New Wave pop music movement that had just occurred in Britain, but this term did not catch on. Bethke later paraphrased Michael Swanwick's argument for the term: ""the movement writers should properly be termed neuromantics,"
"cyberpunk genre itself were also anticipated in John Brunner's 1975 novel ""The Shockwave Rider"". . The idea of a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site was first described in 1962 in a series of memos on the ""Galactic Computer Network"" by J.C.R. Licklider of DARPA. . Gibson wrote the following in the ""Author's Afterword"" of ""Mona Lisa Overdrive"", dated July 16, 1992. ""Neuromancer"" was written on a ""clockwork typewriter,"" the very one you may recall glimpsing in Julie Deane's office in Chiba City. This machine, a Hermes 2000 manual"
"Internet technology with its ‘hacker ethic’ and freeware mentality as an essentially egalitarian form of ‘emergent’ self-organization. It could also overcome the parochial nationalisms that have always divided humanity. He called the Internet international ‘a vast conspiracy whose center is everywhere and nowhere!’` In 1999 Greeman projected this Ecopopian vision into an evolutive, collective science-fiction project. Greeman’s ‘Dream of Revolutionary Emergence’ begins when a multi-player online computer-game called ‘Billions and Billionaires’ goes viral, leading to a planetary general strike and the women of the world join in a dance-craze which goes viral and brings the macho madness of capitalist over-production"
"identity, motives, methods and inspirations on several websites, anticipating the 2006 lonelygirl15 internet phenomenon. However, Gibson later disputed the notion that the creators of lonelygirl15 drew influence from him. Another phenomenon anticipated by Gibson is the rise of reality television, for example in ""Virtual Light"", which featured a satirical extrapolated version of ""COPS"". When an interviewer in 1988 asked about the Bulletin Board System jargon in his writing, Gibson answered ""I'd never so much as touched a PC when I wrote ""Neuromancer""""; he was familiar, he said, with the science-fiction community, which overlapped with the BBS community. Gibson similarly did"
"too many personalities, there was the risk that one of the personas would wrest control of the body from the possessor. In the 1982 novel ""Software"", part of the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, one of the main characters, Cobb Anderson, has his mind downloaded and his body replaced with an extremely human-like android body. The robots who persuade Anderson into doing this sell the process to him as a way to become immortal. In William Gibson's award-winning ""Neuromancer"" (1984), which popularized the concept of ""cyberspace"", a hacking tool used by the main character is an artificial infomorph of a"
"(""Omni"", July 1982) and was a central theme in his 1984 groundbreaking novel, ""Neuromancer."" Since cyberspace has now, through common use, become a term that simply means the Internet, Metaverse is the preferred term for the concept of a virtual shared space that converges with actual reality. Conceptually, the Metaverse describes a future internet of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe, but common standards, interfaces, and communication protocols between and among virtual environment systems are still in development. Several collaborations and working groups have been established in an attempt to create the types of standards"