The novel was the first ever to win the “Triple Crown” (the Hugo award, the Nebula, and the Philip K. The furious editing eventually produced his debut novel, which went on to win an array of awards. Gibson was so worried about the similarities between Neuromancer and the film that he rewrote the first two-thirds of the book twelve times. Neuromancer was released two years after the seminal cyberpunk movie, Blade Runner came to the big screen. This fundamental cyberpunk novel was prophetic in its handling of technology. William Gibson even coined the word “Cyberspace” as a term for the digital reality which he envisioned.

An uninformed reader would be hard-pressed to imagine the book being written during the 1980s, seeing as much of the once-speculative technology has been realized.Īside from the creation of “cyberspace” in the form of the world wide web, technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual reality and cybernetic enhancements all have taken the leap from the page into our lives. Since then, Gibson has remained in Vancouver, and written over a dozen additional novels and a handful of short stories.The opening line to Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson sets the tone for a dark and gritty cyberpunk world that’s progressively looking more like the world of today. He published a series of short stories before being commissioned to write a novel-a work that would turn into Neuromancer, a surprise smash hit. He received a degree in English at the University of British Columbia and began to try his hand at writing. He spent the sixties as a self-proclaimed hippie, before marrying a woman from Vancouver and moving there with her. He moved to Canada to dodge the draft for the Vietnam War. Gibson’s mother died when he was eighteen, and he left school without graduating. However, he didn’t put the same kind of obsessive focus into school, and so his mother sent him to boarding school in southern Arizona. Gibson was a bookish child, obsessed with science fiction. He spent the first few years of his life moving around Virginia because of his father’s job as a manager of a construction company, but when Gibson was six his father died, and his mother moved them to Wytheville, Virginia, where she and Gibson’s father were born and raised.

William Gibson was born in a vacation town on the coast of South Carolina.

Necromancer book william gibson