American-Canadian · b. 1948
William Gibson moved from small-town Virginia to Vancouver to avoid the Vietnam draft and ended up inventing cyberpunk. He wrote Neuromancer on a 1927 Hermes portable typewriter, having never used a computer, yet produced the most prescient vision of digital culture in fiction. His later novels—Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, The Peripheral—shifted from near-future speculation to the equally strange present, earning him recognition as a literary novelist who happens to write about technology. He coined the term 'cyberspace' and has been called the most important SF writer since Philip K. Dick.