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
Sometimes, I can myself be frustrated by books that seem to me to be insufficiently realistic about the world's potential for just being totally a randomly bad place.
We were presented with enough evidence for an indictment to be issued,
I think what's actually happening is I'm just being more overt in terms of what I've always been doing,
I feel the time is right for me to relinquish the reins. It has become increasingly obvious to me that we are meeting and surpassing all the goals we had in mind when we took the company public in 1993.
In a sense, if you're not getting it wrong really a lot when you're creating imaginary futures, then you're just not doing it enough. You're not creating enough imaginary futures.
If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.
I started with Apple, in a pre-Windows era when PCs seemed to involve more of a learning curve. But the fact that I'm yet to acquire so much as a single virus still seems a very good thing.
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.
I'm not a computer guy. I'm like an anthropologist. I'm fascinated with people's obsessions. I've learned to wear them.
Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.
In the early '80s, I happened to find myself in the vicinity of people who would work for Microsoft five years later.
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.
When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.
The thing that 'Neuromancer' predicts as being actually like the Internet isn't actually like the Internet at all!