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
Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet?
I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America.
I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting. I actually tend to suspect that in real life, there have always been very strong female characters, but at certain stages of society, they've been asked to cool it.
It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.
My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they're able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home.
One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy
I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything. I buried everything under layers of code, but the signifiers of my emotionality were there, for me. I knew where the magnets were, behind the gyprock, and the magnets were very powerful. I think they had to be powerful for me, otherwise the reader wouldn't have a reciprocal experience.
I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.
Sometimes, I feel like a time traveller, cause the only way that we can really travel in time is just to get older.
Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.
Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others
We're living in a future that's weirder than anybody except possibly.
The street finds its own uses for things.
Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.