- Born March 17, 1948 in Conway, South Carolina an only child
- Father was a carpenter who died when William was eight.
- After father's death, mother moved to where she grew up in Virginia with William
- Sent to boarding school in Tucson, Arizona at 17
- Thrown out of school a year later for possession of marijuana
- Went back to Virginia and found mother dead
- Was drafted for the Vietnam war but “convinced the draft board that they didn't want me” (Conaway)
- Moved to Vancouver and lived in a community of American draft dodgers since 1972
- Earned bachelor's degree in English Literature from University of British Columbia
- Coined the term cyberspace and envisioned the internet and virtual reality
- Cyberspace was born in the 1970's
Published works:
Neuromancer won the triple crown of science fiction: the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. It is the only novel to ever do this.
The Neuromancer Trilogy (published in 1984, 1986, 1988) includes Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. This series is also known as the Sprawl Series because of where it is set.
Burning Chrome ( book of short stories) published in 1986 that included stories like Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel and the play called Burning Chrome .
Gibson also published Difference Engine, Virtual Light, All Tomorrow's Parties , and Idoru . He also wrote scripts for Aliens III (1992) and an episode of the X-Files entitled “Kill Switch” (1998).
Gibson is in part responsible for the creation of the genre called cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is “the most significant development in science fiction in the 1980s” (Sponsler).
"Cyberpunk is the label under which some of the younger science fiction writers of the 1980's have been marketing their wares, and as neologisms go it represents a fair description of their product. Cyberpunk sci-fi, in its ideal form, is compounded of two elements: a re-envisioning of the consensual future in terms not of space travel and other feats of mega-engineering but of a plastic (that is, wholly malleable) mental landscape that derives from the new possibilities of computer graphics; and punk style, in clothes, hair, sexuality and the abuse of controlled substances. Like punk rock, and like most traditional rocket-and-blaster science fiction, Cyberpunk caters to the wish-fulfillment requirements of male teenagers, but this is a job that can be done with varying degrees of panache, and there is currently no more accomplished caterer than William Gibson. He is the undisputed champion of Cyberpunk."
-Thomas M. Disch (NY Times review of Mona Lisa Overdrive) (Brothersjudd.com)