Portal:United States/Selected culture biography/11
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William Gibson is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. In 1982, Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" and popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). Gibson is best known for depicting a visualised, worldwide communications network before it became ubiquitous in the 1990s, and he is credited with anticipating and establishing the conceptual foundations of the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular.
After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson became a central figure to an entirely different science fiction sub-genre – steampunk – with the 1990 alternate history novel The Difference Engine, written in collaboration with Bruce Sterling. In the 1990s he composed the Bridge trilogy of novels, which focused on sociological observations of near future urban environments and late-stage capitalism. His most recent novels – Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007) – are set in a contemporary world and have put Gibson's work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.
To date, Gibson has written more than twenty short stories, nine novels (one in collaboration), a nonfiction artist's book, and has contributed articles to several major publications and collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers and musicians.
