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 think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F - it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well.
I didn't have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.
The culture is still there, and people are still doing it. I imagine some people are doing it very well indeed. As for me, it definitely was my native literary culture. Science fiction was where I'm from, but on the way to now, I went through a lot of other territory, and I wasn't really that culturally conventional an SF writer when I started.
I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably.
The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.
I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.
I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.
I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.
I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.