William Ford Gibson, born in 1948, is an American-Canadian writer often called the noir prophet of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Raised in the American South, he settled in Canada and emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as the central figure of a new, gritty, technology-saturated kind of science fiction.
He coined the term cyberspace in his short story Burning Chrome and popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer, published in 1984. Neuromancer swept the field's major awards and created an iconography for the information age years before the Internet became part of daily life.
His early Sprawl trilogy, including Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, defined cyberpunk's look and concerns. He is credited with anticipating reality television, virtual environments, and the cultural shape of a networked world.
Gibson's later novels, including the Bridge and Blue Ant trilogies and the books beginning with The Peripheral, moved closer to the present day while keeping his signature eye for how technology reshapes culture. He remains one of the most influential science fiction writers of his era.
