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Written in October of 2002 by Earl Conaway, university of colorado student.
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William Gibson
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Cyberspace--A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the bank of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters, and constellations of data. Like city lights receding.
People today do not see cyberspace as something, or somewhere to fear. We see it as an opportunity to gain or to bestow information through mediums such as television, radio, and of special importance to us today, the Internet. These forms of technology have helped us gather information easier than ever, the Internet more so than the others. Most often we can enjoy these technologies without us ever leaving our homes, and we love it. But William Gibson saw the possible maladies of our present fascination with technology. As a result, Gibson wrote science fiction to comment on our current state of society, in a futuristic setting, years before the Internet became a reality. Welcome to the life of the "Father of Cyberpunk."
Born on March 17, 1948, in Conway, South Carolina an only son, William Gibson spent most of his childhood years "roving" the United States. William's father supported the family as a contractor, once installing flush toilets for the Oak Ridge Projects (where the first atomic bomb was manufactured) but died when William was only eight years old. After his father's death, William's mother moved the two of them back to the small Virginia town where she had grown up until William was seventeen. Then, it was off to boarding school in Tucson, Arizona. There, he was first introduced to the wave of "San Francisco hippy run-off" and urban kids whom he valued because they were older and into "cool things."
Less than a year later, Gibson was thrown out of boarding school for possession of marijuana. He went back to Virginia only to find out his had mother died and his relatives none too sympathetic to his situation. After being drafted for the war in Vietnam, Gibson states he "convinced the draft board that they didn't want me" and left for Vancouver. He ended up living in a community of American draft dodgers. It was here in the 1970s that the concept for cyberspace was born.
I was walking down Granville Street, Vancouver's version of "The Strip," and I looked into one of the video arcades. I could see in the physical intensity of their postures, how rapt the kids were inside were. It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: a feedback loop with photons coming off the screens into the kids' eyes, neurons moving through their bodies, and electrons moving through the video game. These kids clearly believed in the space games projected. Everyone I know who works with computers seems to develop a belief that there's some kind of actual space behind the screen, someplace you can't see but you know is there.
But it would take years for Gibson to officially become a science fiction writer.
The years prior to and leading up to his first novel, Gibson used English as a way not to get a full time occupation. "I realized I could get the grades I needed as an English major to keep getting the grants I needed to avoid getting a job." He even considered writing about science fiction for a living. He played with the idea all while writing and selling the science fiction short stories that would eventually become a novel in its own right, Burning Chrome. But it took a man with a vision to get Gibson to write his first novel and forever immortalize his idea of cyberspace.
Then Terry Carr recruited me to write a book, which turned out to be Neuromancer. He was looking for people he thought had some promise--he'd offer contracts and say, "Do you want to write a book?" I said "Yes" almost without thinking, but then I was stuck with a project I wasn't sure I was ready for. In fact I was terrified once I actually sat down and started to think about what it meant. I didn't think I could actually fill up that many pages. I didn't even know how many pages the manuscript of a novel was "supposed" to have.
Guided by "blind animal panic" and fueled by Gibson's terrible fear of losing the readers' attention, Neuromancer is Gibson's first and most famous novel. In it, Gibson describes a futuristic world where cyberspace is a functional reality. Whereas we plug in our computers to the Internet, humans in the future "jack in" to cyberspace by literally plugging their brains in to a system of information. One can only imagine the possibilities of a world gone haywire. Neuromancer gained critical success by winning the triple crown of science fiction writing; the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Phillip K. Dick Award. Neuromancer is still the only novel ever to do this.
Once on board the train of critical success, Gibson went back to Chiba-A (where Neuromancer takes place) to write a second novel called Count Zero. In this novel, Gibson analyzes the cyberspace evolution seven years after Wintermute in Neuromancer. Though a lesser critical success, Mona Lisa Overdrive completes the trilogy by combining the characters and plots from the two previous novels, its action taking place seven years after Count Zero concludes.
During the releasing of the Neuromancer Trilogy (1984, 1986, 1988) Burning Chrome was published in 1986. This collection of both old and new stories contained the premises for such movies as Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel, as well as a play entitled Burning Chrome, which is named after the short story in the book. Gibson also published such novels as Difference Engine, Virtual Light, All Tomorrow's Parties, and Idoru, as well as the scripts to Aliens III in 1992 and a episode of the X-Files entitled "Kill Switch" in 1998.
William Gibson, now 54 years old and still writing, lives with his wife in Vancouver.
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