William Gibson

William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian science fiction writer credited with founding the cyberpunk subgenre and coining the term "cyberspace." He was born in Conway, South Carolina, and raised mostly in Wytheville, Virginia, after his father's death when he was six. He moved to Toronto in 1967, partly to avoid the Vietnam draft, and settled in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1972, where he later took Canadian citizenship.

Gibson studied English at the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1977. He published his first short story, Fragments of a Hologram Rose, that same year in UnEarth magazine. The 1981 short story Burning Chrome, in Omni, introduced the term cyberspace; Johnny Mnemonic followed in 1981 and New Rose Hotel in 1984.

His first novel, Neuromancer (1984), won the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards in a single year—the first novel to do so. With Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), it formed the Sprawl trilogy and crystallized cyberpunk as a literary movement. He co-wrote The Difference Engine (1990) with Bruce Sterling, an alternate-history steampunk novel set in a Victorian Britain transformed by Charles Babbage's mechanical computers.

Gibson followed with the Bridge trilogy—Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999)—and then turned to the present-day Blue Ant trilogy beginning with Pattern Recognition (2003). He was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2008. His later novels include The Peripheral (2014) and Agency (2020), both adapted by Amazon Prime Video.

Etymology: William comes from the Old Germanic Wilhelm, combining wil "will" and helm "helmet, protection," giving the sense "resolute protector." It came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066 and has remained one of the most enduring boy names in the English-speaking world, holding steady in the US top ten through his birth year of 1948. He has carried it through forty years on the cutting edge of science fiction.