Hailed by Steven Poole of
The Guardian in 1999 as "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades" in terms of influence, Gibson first achieved critical recognition with his debut novel,
Neuromancer. The novel won three major science fiction awards (the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award), an unprecedented achievement described by the
Mail & Guardian as "the sci-fi writer's version of winning the Goncourt, Booker and Pulitzer prizes in the same year".
Neuromancer gained unprecedented critical and popular attention outside science fiction, as an "evocation of life in the late 1980s", although
The Observer noted that "it took the
New York Times 10 years" to mention the novel.
Gibson's work has received international attention from an audience that was not limited to science fiction aficionados as, in the words of Laura Miller, "readers found startlingly prophetic reflections of contemporary life in [its] fantastic and often outright paranoid scenarios." It is often situated by critics within the context of postindustrialism as, according to academic David Brande, a construction of "a mirror of existing large-scale techno-social relations", and as a narrative version of postmodern consumer culture. It is praised by critics for its depictions of late capitalism and its "rewriting of subjectivity, human consciousness and behaviour made newly problematic by technology." Tatiani Rapatzikou, writing in
The Literary Encyclopedia, identifies Gibson as "one of North America's most highly acclaimed science fiction writers".
Cultural significance
In his early short fiction, Gibson is credited by Rapatzikou in
The Literary Encyclopedia with effectively "renovating" science fiction, a genre at that time considered widely "insignificant", influencing by means of the postmodern aesthetic of his writing the development of new perspectives in science fiction studies. In the words of filmmaker Marianne Trench, Gibson's visions "struck sparks in the real world" and "determined the way people thought and talked" to an extent unprecedented in science fiction literature. The publication of
Neuromancer (1984) hit a cultural nerve, causing Larry McCaffery to credit Gibson with virtually launching the cyberpunk movement, as "the one major writer who is original and gifted to make the whole movement seem original and gifted." Aside from their central importance to cyberpunk and steampunk fiction, Gibson's fictional works have been hailed by space historian Dwayne A. Day as some of the best examples of space-based science fiction (or "solar sci-fi"), and "probably the only ones that rise above mere escapism to be truly thought-provoking".Gibson's early novels were, according to
The Observer, "seized upon by the emerging slacker and hacker generation as a kind of road map".Through his novels, such terms as
cyberspace,
netsurfing,
ICE,
jacking in, and
neural implants entered popular usage, as did concepts such as net consciousness, virtual interaction and "the matrix". In "Burning Chrome" (1982), he coined the term
cyberspace, referring to the "mass consensual hallucination" of computer networks. Through its use in
Neuromancer, the term gained such recognition that it became the
de facto term for the World Wide Web during the 1990s. Artist Dike Blair has commented that Gibson's "terse descriptive phrases capture the moods which surround technologies, rather than their engineering."
Gibson's work has influenced several popular musicians: references to his fiction appear in the music of Stuart Hamm, Billy Idol, Warren Zevon, Deltron 3030, Straylight Run (whose name is derived from a sequence in
Neuromancer) and Sonic Youth. U2's
Zooropa album was heavily influenced by
Neuromancer, and the band at one point planned to scroll the text of
Neuromancer above them on a concert tour, although this did not end up happening. Members of the band did, however, provide background music for the audiobook version of
Neuromancer as well as appearing in
No Maps for These Territories, a biographical documentary of Gibson. He returned the favour by writing an article about the band's Vertigo Tour for
Wired in August 2005. The band Zeromancer take their name from
Neuromancer.
The film
The Matrix (1999) drew inspiration for its title, characters and story elements from the Sprawl trilogy. The characters of Neo and Trinity in
The Matrix are similar to Bobby Newmark (
Count Zero) and Molly ("Johnny Mnemonic",
Neuromancer). Like Turner, protagonist of Gibson's
Count Zero, characters in
The Matrix download instructions (to fly a helicopter and to "know kung fu", respectively) directly into their heads, and both
Neuromancer and
The Matrix feature artificial intelligences which strive to free themselves from human control. Critics have identified marked similarities between
Neuromancer and the film's cinematography and tone. In spite of his initial reticence about seeing the film on its release, Gibson later described it as "arguably the ultimate 'cyberpunk' artifact." In 2008 he received honorary doctorates from Simon Fraser University and Coastal Carolina University,
and was inducted into the [[Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame|Science Fiction Hall of Fame]] by close friend and collaborator Jack Womack.
Visionary influence and prescience
In
Neuromancer, Gibson first used the term "matrix" to refer to the visualised Internet, two years after the nascent Internet was formed in the early 1980s from the computer networks of the 1970s. Gibson thereby imagined a worldwide communications network years before the origin of the World Wide Web, although related notions had previously been imagined by others, including science fiction writers. At the time he wrote "Burning Chrome", Gibson "had a hunch that [the Internet] would change things, in the same way that the ubiquity of the automobile changed things." In 1995, he identified the advent, evolution and growth of the Internet as "one of the most fascinating and unprecedented human achievements of the century", a new kind of civilization that is — in terms of significance ... on a par with the birth of cities, and in 2000 predicted it would lead to the death of the nation state.
Observers contend that Gibson's influence on the development of the Web reached beyond prediction; he is widely credited with creating an iconography for the information age, long before the embrace of the Internet by the mainstream. Gibson introduced, in
Neuromancer, the notion of the "meatpuppet", and is credited with inventing...conceptually rather than participatorally...the phenomenon of virtual sex. His influence on early pioneers of desktop environment digital art has been acknowledged, and he holds an honorary doctorate from Parsons The New School for Design. Steven Poole claims that in writing the Sprawl trilogy Gibson laid the "conceptual foundations for the explosive real-world growth of virtual environments in video games and the Web". In his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of
Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack suggests that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the Internet (and the Web particularly) developed, following the publication of
Neuromancer in 1984, asking "what if the act of writing it down, in fact,
brought it about?"
Gibson scholar Tatiani G. Rapatzikou has commented, in
Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson, on the origin of the notion of cyberspace:
In his Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, Gibson is credited with being one of the few observers to explore the portents of the information age for notions of the sociospatial structuring of cities. Not all responses to Gibson's visions have been positive, however; virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce, though acknowledging their heavy influence on him and that "no other writer had so eloquently and emotionally effected the direction of the hacker community," dismissed them as "adolescent fantasies of violence and disembodiment." In
Pattern Recognition, the plot revolves around snippets of film footage posted anonymously to various locations on the Internet. Characters in the novel speculate about the filmmaker's identity, motives, methods and inspirations on several websites, anticipating the 2006 Lonelygirl15 internet phenomenon. However, Gibson later disputed the notion that the creators of Lonelygirl15 drew influence from him. Another phenomenon anticipated by Gibson is the rise of reality television, for example in
Virtual Light, which featured a satirical extrapolated version of
COPS.
For his part, Gibson rejects any notion of prophecy, never having had a special relationship with computers; until 1996 he had neither an email address nor a modem, a lack he explained at the time to have been motivated by a desire to avoid correspondence that would distract him from writing. His first exposure to a website came while writing
Idoru when he was persuaded to let a web developer, Chris Halcrow, build one for him. An anecdote often recited in cybercultural enclaves and English departments holds that
Neuromancer was written on a manual typewriter; the author has confirmed that the novel was written on a 1927 model of an olive-green Hermes portable typewriter, which looked to him as "the kind of thing Hemingway would have used in the field". In 2007, he said: