The cyberspace has made people operate with microchips. The hero is a console cowboy. He’s waging his war for profit, of course.
William Gibson was born in the United States in 1948. He grew up in Virginia, where, after the death of his father, he was introduced to the Beat movement and science fiction.
In 1968, during the Vietnam War era, he moved to Canada to avoid military conscription, and he has lived there ever since.
His first published work was Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977). In 1986, his short story collection Burning Chromewas released, which includes “Johnny Mnemonic”, later adapted into a film starring Keanu Reeves.
Gibson gained widespread fame with his “Sprawl Trilogy”: Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). Neuromancer won the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards and became a cornerstone of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction.
He is often regarded as a “prophet” of the Internet and the World Wide Web. His works, as well as those of writers influenced by him, depict a dark futuristic world in which real power lies in the hands of multinational corporations, and the most valuable commodity is information stored in computers connected through a vast virtual network known as cyberspace.
In this world, daring individuals connect their brains directly to the network in order to steal information—entering a digital realm that is as real and tangible to them as physical reality, but full of lethal dangers.
In 1990, he co-authored The Difference Engine with Bruce Sterling. In 1993, he published Virtual Light. Throughout the 1990s, Gibson produced the “Bridge Trilogy”. In 1996 came Idoru, followed by All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999), Pattern Recognition (2003), and Spook Country (2007).
But above all for survival, among living computers – more alive than humans – dangerous or highly voluptuous holograms and strange ghosts, unexpectedly encountered in a Cyberspace that is autonomous from its creators.
And of course in all of this, love has its place and no cyberspace can replace it.