Today in Technology History
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March 17
The writer who coined the word "cyberspace" turns 55 years old today.
William Ford Gibson III was born on March 17, 1948 in South Carolina. He grew up in a "boring, culturally deprived" town in Virginia, so his formative years were characterized by what he later called "intense, geeky isolation in a rather dull environment." Both his parents were dead by the time he was 18, and Gibson soon permanently moved to Canada (in part to escape the draft, even though he had been deemed unfit for service). He went to college, got married and became a father.
Gibson started writing professionally so he could stay at home with his children while his wife worked. He published stories in science fiction magazines, then came out with his first book, Neuromancer, in 1984. That book first introduced the word "cyberspace" to a wide audience, although Gibson had coined the word three years earlier in a short story. Here’s how "cyberspace" was described in Neuromancer:
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."
Nowadays, of course, we use the word "cyberspace" to describe something simpler -- the networked world of modern computerized communication.
Neuromancer was a hit with the public and the critics, and Gibson was hailed as the leader of a new sub-genre of science fiction, "cyberpunk," which is known for its emphasis on computers, hacking, drugs, slang, different cultures, evil corporations and artificial intelligence. These themes have also figured in the handful of books Gibson wrote since Neuromancer, including Pattern Recognition, released last month.
Related links:
Click here to visit Gibson’s homepage, which includes a blog that Gibson frequently updates.
While he was writing Neuromancer, Gibson went to see the movie "Blade Runner" based on a novel by Philip K. Dick. The movie "looked so much like the inside of my head," Gibson later said, "that I fled the theatre after about thirty minutes..." To read more about Philip K. Dick, click here.
Click here and here to read about Gibson’s new book, Pattern Recognition.
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