It sent a shockwave through the science fiction community that brought similarly minded writers crawling out of the woodwork, and nothing has been the same since. His first short stories (the brilliantly incendiary troika “Johnny Mnemonic,” “New Rose Hotel,” and “Burning Chrome,” published in OMNI magazine at the dawn of the ’80s), wasted no time in establishing his trademark intensity as the standard by which all other future SF will be measured. While the latter had long been a staple of bad science fiction, Gibson makes it breathe: When he writes about it, you can smell the heavy, fetid, urine-laden air and feel every drop of grime sputtering down from the sooty geodesic “sky.” Most of the mood of cyberpunk-the pacing, the language, the brand-name physicality-can be traced to his lead. Cyberspace-the shadowy four-dimensional universe of data that his computer-jock protagonists jack into - and the Sprawl-an artifact of the terminal stage of urban overrun, a single city that covers the entire Eastern Sea board from Boston to Atlanta-are his inventions.Īlso Read 30 Overlooked 1992 Albums Turning 30 He is responsible for most of the innovations that have become, regrettably, the fixtures of the almost-cliched-by-now generic cyberpunk story.

Gibson was the point man for what is now known as cyberpunk as soon as his writing hit the light of day. He has smashed a hole through the moribund haze of the science fiction subculture like nothing since the New Wave of the late ’60s. Gibson’s stuff is the reactor-core steam of all tomorrow’s parties breathing down your neck today. To a large degree, this is due to William Gibson, whose writings- Neuromancer, Count Zero, Burning Chrome, and the new Mona Lisa Overdrive-have taken the mainstream’s assumptions about science fiction (nerdy, reactionary, desexed) and rotated them 180 degrees on their vertical axis. It has acquired all the sinuous grace and breathless, sweaty eroticism of the finest rock’n’roll it kicks in with visceral urgency that smacks of addiction. In the last couple of years, science fiction has tossed off the little-green-men albatross and turned overnight into a sleek, well-oiled, dangerous thing-a matte-black Stealth bomber constructed of words. This article originally appeared in the December 1988 issue of SPIN.

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