William Gibson
William Gibson
William Ford Gibsonis an American and 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 bleak, 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 March 1948
CityConway, SC
CountryUnited States of America
I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was.
I'm interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I'm often amazed they don't quite seem to have a sense of where they're from. They're like the citizens of the airport.
We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that.
In 1981, I was a futurist - or at least I was a guy who put on a futurist hat occasionally - and I wrote about the 21st century.
Science fiction was one of those places, particularly during the McCarthy era, where you could write whatever you wanted because it was beneath contempt. They didn't bother censoring it.
I try to be objective about technology. Agnostic, in a sense. Whatever personal opinions I form tend to have more to do with what we find to do with the new thing.
The people I hang out with tend to use Macs, not that I think they're necessarily superior.
I read a great deal of science fiction with consummate pleasure between, say, the ages of 12 and 16. Then I got away from it. In my mid- to late 20s, I started trying to write it.
If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.
When I wrote 'Neuromancer', I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense, I intended 'Neuromancer', among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me.
Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.
If I write something set 60 years in the future, I am going to have to explain how humanity got there, and that's becoming quite a big job.
I'm not a computer guy. I'm like an anthropologist. I'm fascinated with people's obsessions. I've learned to wear them.
I've never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don't watch them; I watch how people behave around them. That's becoming more difficult to do because everything is around them.