An Interview with William Gibson

Abstract

Introduction In 1984 William Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, burst onto the scene of contemporary science fiction like a super nova. The energy, heat, and shock waves from that explosion predictably had its most immediate impact on the relatively in sular SF field. Neuromancer became the first novel to win SF's triple crown of awards (The Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards) and, in the process, it virtually single-handedly launched the cyberpunk movement. Neuromancer, with its stunning techno-poetical prose surface and its super-specified evocation of life in a sleazed-out global village of the near fu ture, has rapidly gained an unprecedented critical and popular attention from outside SF's ghetto. Prior to the publication of Neuromancer, Gibson had published only a half-dozen stories (since collected in Chrome [1986]). Although several of these stories display flashes of Gibson's abilities (two of them, Johnny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome, introduced motifs and elements elaborated upon in the later novels), clearly Neuromancer was a major imaginative Icap forward for Gibson, who had never even attempted to write a novel previously. From the very opcning words of the novel-'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel-the sources of all this white light and white heat being generated by this new kid on the block were immediately apparent. Dense, kaleido

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.