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For other persons named William Gibson, see William Gibson (disambiguation).
William Ford Gibson (born 3 March 1948) is an American-CanadianGibson, William. "Modern boys and mobile girls", The Japan issue, The Observer, 2001-04-01. Retrieved on 2007-10-28. 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 established in the 1990s, and he is credited with anticipating and establishing the conceptual foundations of the Internet.
Having moved around frequently with his family as a child, Gibson grew to be a shy, ungainly teenager who took refuge in reading science fiction. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding school in Arizona, Gibson dodged the draft at the onset of the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada in 1967, where he became immersed in counterculture and after settling in Vancouver eventually became a full-time writer; he retains dual citizenship. Gibson\'s early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of computer networks and modern mass media on humans – "lowlife meets high tech". They attracted widespread attention after being published in science fiction magazines, and eventually effectively renovated the science fiction genre, making their mark far beyond it. The themes, settings and characters developed in these stories culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered unprecedented critical and considerable commercial success, virtually launching the cyberpunk literary movement.
Although much of Gibson\'s reputation has remained rooted in Neuromancer, his work has continued to evolve in style and concept. After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson helped define 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.
Gibson is one of the most acclaimed American science fiction writers, feted by The Guardian in 1999 as "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades". To date, Gibson has written two dozens short stories, nine critically acclaimed 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. His work has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors, academia, cyberculture, and technology.
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William S. Burroughs at his 69th birthday party in 1983. Burroughs, more than any other beat generation writer, was an important influence on the adolescent Gibson.
William Ford Gibson was born in 1948 in the coastal city of Conway, South Carolina and spent most of his childhood in Wytheville, Virginia, a small mining town in the Appalachians where his parents had been born and raised.Adams, Tim; Emily Stokes, James Flint (2007-08-12). Space to think. Books by genre. The Observer. Retrieved on 2007-10-26. His family moved frequently during Gibson\'s youth due to his father\'s position as manager of a large construction company. While Gibson was still a young child,[VI] his father choked to death in a restaurant while on a business trip. His mother, unwilling to tell William the bad news, had someone else inform him of the death.Solomon, Deborah. "Back From the Future", Questions for William Gibson, The New York Times Magazine, 2007-08-19, pp. 13. Retrieved on 2007-10-13.
Loss is not without its curious advantages for the artist. Major traumatic breaks are pretty common in the biographies of artists I respect.—William Gibson, interview with The New York Times Magazine, August 19, 2007.
A few days after the death, Gibson\'s mother returned them from their home in Norfolk, Virginia to Wytheville. Gibson later described Wytheville as "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted" and credits the beginnings of his relationship with science fiction, his "native literary culture", with the subsequent feeling of abrupt exile.Gibson, William (2002-11-06). "Since 1948". Retrieved on 2007-11-04. At thirteen, unbeknownst to his mother, he purchased an anthology of Beat writing, thereby gaining exposure to the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs; Burroughs had a particularly pronounced effect, greatly altering Gibson\'s notions of the possibilities of science fiction literature.
A shy, ungainly teenager, Gibson consciously rejected religion and took refuge in reading science fiction and edgier, renegade writers such as Burroughs and Henry Miller.Marshall, John. "William Gibson\'s new novel asks, is the truth stranger than science fiction today?", Books, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2003-02-06. Retrieved on 2007-11-03. At fifteen, he was sent to a private boarding school in Tucson, Arizona by his then "chronically anxious and depressive" mother, who had remained in Wytheville since the death of her husband and who died when Gibson was nineteen. Tom Maddox has commented that Gibson "grew up in an America as disturbing and surreal as anything J.G. Ballard ever dreamed".Maddox, Tom (1989). Maddox on Gibson. Retrieved on 2007-10-26. “This story originally appeared in a Canadian \'zine, Virus 23, 1989.”
Gibson at a 2007 reading of Spook Country in Victoria, British Columbia. Since "The Winter Market" (1985), commissioned by Vancouver Magazine with the stipulation that it be set in the city, Gibson actively avoided using his adopted home as a setting until Spook Country.Wiebe, Joe. "Writing Vancouver", Special to the Sun, The Vancouver Sun, 2007-10-13. Retrieved on 2008-02-01.
After his mother\'s death, Gibson left school without graduating and became very isolated for a long time, traveling to California and Europe and immersing himself in counterculture. In 1967, he elected to move to Canada in order "to avoid the Vietnam war draft". At his draft hearing, he informed interviewers honestly that his intention in life was to sample every mind-altering substance in existence. Gibson has observed that he "did literally evade the draft, as they never bothered drafting me"; after the hearing he went home and purchased a bus ticket to Toronto, and left a week or two later.Mark Neale (director), William Gibson (subject). (2000). No Maps for These Territories [Documentary]. Docurama. In the biographical documentary No Maps for These Territories (2000) Gibson said that his draft dodging was motivated less by conscientious objection than by a desire to "sleep with hippie chicks" and indulge in hashish.
In Toronto he found the emigre community of American draft dodgers unbearable due to the prevalence of clinical depression, suicide and hardcore substance abuse. He appeared, during the Summer of Love of 1967, in a CBC newsreel item about hippie subculture in Yorkville, Toronto, (1967-09-04). Yorkville: Hippie haven (14 min Windows Media Video; "This is Bill" appears first after 0:45). Rochdale College: Organized anarchy (16 min radio recording Windows Media Audio; interviews start after 4:11). Yorkville, Toronto: CBC.ca. Retrieved on 2008-02-01. for which he was paid $500 – the equivalent of 20 weeks rent – which financed his later travels.Gibson, William (2003-05-01). That CBC Archival Footage. Retrieved on 2007-11-26. Aside from a "brief, riot-torn spell" in the District of Columbia, Gibson spent the rest of the 1960s in Toronto, where he met a Vancouver girl with whom he subsequently traveled to Europe. Gibson has recounted that they concentrated their travels on European nations with fascist regimes and favourable exchange rates, including spending time on a Greek archipelago and in Istanbul in 1970, as they "couldn\'t afford to stay anywhere that had anything remotely like hard currency".Mike Rogers (1993-10-01). In Same Universe. Lysator Sweden Science Fiction Archive. Archived from the original on 2007-04-19. Retrieved on 2007-11-06.
The couple married and settled in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1972, with Gibson looking after their first child while they lived off his wife\'s teaching salary. During the 1970s Gibson made a substantial part of his living from scouring Salvation Army thrift stores for underpriced artifacts he would then up-market to specialist dealers.Gibson, William (January 1999). "My Obsession". Wired.com (7.01). Retrieved on 2007-12-02. Realizing that it was easier to sustain high college grades, and thus qualify for generous student financial aid, than to work, he enrolled at the University of British Columbia (UBC), earning "a desultory bachelor\'s degree in English" in 1977. (2004-03-04) "UBC Alumni: The First Cyberpunk". UBC Reports 50 (3). Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia. Retrieved on 2007-11-02. Through studying English literature, he was exposed to a wider range of fiction than he would have read otherwise; something he credits with giving him ideas inaccessible from within the culture of science fiction, including an awareness of postmodernity. It was at UBC that he attended his first course on science fiction, at the end of which he was encouraged to write his first short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose".
Punk rock band The Clash performing in 1980. The punk subculture had a significant influence on Gibson\'s early writing in the mid-to-late 1970s and on the nascent cyberpunk movement in general.
After considering pursuing a master\'s degree on the topic of hard science fiction novels as fascist literature, Gibson discontinued writing in the year that followed graduation and, as one critic put it, expanded his collection of punk records.Calcutt, Andrew (1999). Cult Fiction. Chicago: Contemporary Books. ISBN 9780809225064. OCLC 42363052. During this period he worked at various jobs, including a three-year stint as teaching assistant on a film history course at his alma mater. Impatient at much of what he saw at a science fiction convention in Vancouver in 1980 or 1981, Gibson found in fellow panelist, punk musician and author John Shirley, a kindred spirit.McCaffery, Larry (1991). Storming the Reality Studio: a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern science fiction. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822311683. OCLC 23384573. The two became immediate and lifelong friends, and it was Shirley who persuaded Gibson to sell his early short stories and to take writing seriously.
Through Shirley, Gibson came into contact with science fiction authors Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner; reading Gibson\'s work, they realised that it was, as Sterling put it, "breakthrough material" and that they needed to "put down our preconceptions and pick up on this guy from Vancouver; this [was] the way forward." Gibson met Sterling at a science fiction convention in Denver, Colorado in the autumn of 1981, where he read "Burning Chrome" – the first cyberspace short story – to an audience of four people, and later stated that Sterling "completely got it".
In October 1982 Gibson traveled to Austin, Texas for ArmadilloCon, at which he appeared with Shirley, Sterling and Shiner on a panel called "Behind the Mirrorshades: A Look at Punk SF", where Shiner noted "the sense of a movement solidified".Shiner, Lewis; George Edgar Slusser, Tom Shippey (1992). "Inside the Movement: Past, Present and Future", Fiction 2000:Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ISBN 9780820314259. OCLC 24953403. After a weekend discussing rock\'n\'roll, MTV, Japan, fashion, drugs and politics, Gibson left the cadre for Vancouver, declaring half-jokingly that "a new axis has been formed." Sterling, Shiner, Shirley and Gibson, along with Rudolf Rucker, went on to form the core of the radical cyberpunk literary movement.Bould, Mark (2005). "Cyberpunk", in David Seed: A Companion to Science Fiction. Blackwell Publishing Professional, 217–218. ISBN 9781405112185. OCLC 56924865.
A graffiti-covered refrigerator abandoned in the French Quarter of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, illustrating Gibson\'s famous dictum "the street finds its own uses for things" ("Burning Chrome", 1981).
For more details on this topic, see Burning Chrome.
Gibson\'s early writings are generally near-future stories about the influences of cybernetics and cyberspace (computer-simulated reality) technology on the human race. His themes of hi-tech shanty towns, recorded or broadcast stimulus (later to be developed into the "sim-stim" package featured so heavily in Neuromancer), and dystopic intermingling of technology and humanity, are already evident in his first published short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" (1977). The latter thematic obsession was described by his friend and fellow author, Bruce Sterling, in the introduction of Gibson\'s short story collection Burning Chrome, as "Gibson\'s classic one-two combination of lowlife and high tech."Gibson, William; Bruce Sterling (1986). "Introduction", Burning Chrome. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 0060539828. OCLC 51342671.
In the early 1980s, Gibson\'s stories appeared in Omni and Universe 11, wherein his fiction developed a film noir, bleak feel. He consciously distanced himself as far as possible from the mainstream of science fiction (towards which he felt "an aesthetic revulsion", expressed in "The Gernsback Continuum"), to the extent that his highest goal was to become "a minor cult figure, a sort of lesser Ballard." When Bruce Sterling started to distribute the stories, he found that "people were just genuinely baffled... I mean they could not literally parse the guy\'s paragraphs... the imaginative tropes he was inventing were just beyond peoples\' grasp."
While Larry McCaffery has commented that these early short stories displayed flashes of Gibson\'s ability, science fiction critic Darko Suvin has identified them as "undoubtedly [cyberpunk\'s] best works", constituting the "furthest horizon" of the genre. The themes which Gibson developed in the stories, the Sprawl setting of "Burning Chrome" and the character of Molly Millions from "Johnny Mnemonic" ultimately culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer.
Skyscape of Chiba City, the primary setting of Neuromancer, on 2006-11-24.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.—opening sentence of Neuromancer (1984)
Neuromancer was commissioned by Terry Carr for the third series of Ace Science Fiction Specials, featuring exclusively debut novels. Given a year to complete the work,Gibson, William (2003-09-04). Neuromancer: The Timeline. Retrieved on 2007-11-26. Gibson undertook the actual writing out of "blind animal terror" at the obligation to write an entire novel – a feat which he felt he was "four or five years away from." After witnessing the first twenty minutes of landmark film Blade Runner (1982) which was released when Gibson had written a third of the novel, he "figured [Neuromancer] was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I’d copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film."Gibson, William (2003-01-17). Oh Well, While I\'m Here: Bladerunner. Retrieved on 2008-01-21. He re-wrote the first two-thirds of the book twelve times, feared losing the reader\'s attention and was convinced that he would be "permanently shamed" following its publication; yet what resulted was a major imaginative leap forward for a first-time novelist.
Neuromancer\'s release was not greeted with fanfare, but it hit a cultural nerve, quickly becoming an underground word-of-mouth hit. It became the first novel to win the three major science fiction awards (the Nebula, the Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award for paperback original) and sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide.Cheng, Alastair. 77. Neuromancer (1984). The LRC 100: Canada\'s Most Important Books. Literary Review of Canada. Retrieved on 2007-09-09.
Lawrence Person in his "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto" (1998) identified Neuromancer as "the archetypal cyberpunk work",Person, Lawrence (Winter/Spring 1998). "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto". Nova Express 4 (4). Retrieved on 2007-11-06. and in 2005, Time magazine included it in their list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, opining that "[t]here is no way to overstate how radical [Neuromancer] was when it first appeared."Grossman, Lev; Richard Lacayo. Neuromancer (1984). TIME Magazine All-Time 100 Novels. Time. Retrieved on 2007-11-06. According to literary critic Larry McCaffery, the auspiciousness of the novel was in its originality of vision, exhilarating prose, and technological similes and metaphors. He described the concept of the matrix as a place where "data dance with human consciousness... human memory is literalized and mechanized... multi-national information systems mutate and breed into startling new structures whose beauty and complexity are unimaginable, mystical, and above all nonhuman." Gibson later commented on himself as an author circa Neuromancer that "I\'d buy him a drink, but I don\'t know if I\'d loan him any money," and referred to the novel as "an adolescent\'s book". The success of Neuromancer was to effect the 34-year old Gibson\'s emergence from obscurity.
The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, a fictional squatted version of which constitutes the setting for Gibson\'s Bridge trilogy.
Although much of Gibson\'s reputation has remained rooted in Neuromancer, his work continued to evolve conceptually and stylistically. Despite adding the final sentence of Neuromancer “He never saw Molly again” at the last minute in a deliberate attempt to prevent himself from ever writing a sequel, he did precisely that with Count Zero (1986), a slower-paced character-focused work set in the Sprawl alluded to in its predecessor.Gibson, William (2003-01-01). (untitled weblog post). Retrieved on 2008-01-21. He next intended to write an unrelated postmodern space opera, titled The Log of the Mustang Sally, but reneged on the contract with Arbor House after a falling out over the dustjacket art of their hardcover of Count Zero.Gibson, William (2005-08-15). The Log of the Mustang Sally. Retrieved on 2008-01-21. Abandoning The Log of the Mustang Sally, Gibson instead wrote Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), a stylistically virtuosic novel which in the words of Larry McCaffery "turned off the lights" on cyberpunk literature. It was a culmination of his previous two novels, set in the same universe with shared characters, thereby completing the Sprawl trilogy. The trilogy solidified Gibson\'s reputation, with both later novels earning Nebula and Hugo Award nominations.
The Sprawl trilogy was followed by the 1990 novel The Difference Engine, an alternate history novel Gibson wrote in collaboration with Bruce Sterling. Set in a technologically advanced Victorian era Britain, the novel was a departure from the authors\' cyberpunk roots. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1991 and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1992, and is often cited as a central novel of the steampunk genre.Bebergal, Peter. "The age of steampunk", The Boston Globe, 2007-08-26, p. 3. Retrieved on 2007-10-14.
Gibson\'s second series, "the Bridge trilogy", is composed of Virtual Light (1993), a "darkly comic urban detective story", Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow\'s Parties (1999). It centers on San Francisco in the near future and evinces Gibson\'s recurring themes of technological, physical, and spiritual transcendence in a more grounded, matter-of-fact style than his first trilogy.Alexander, Scott (2007-08-09). Spook Country. Arts & Entertainment. Playboy.com. Retrieved on 2007-11-06. The Salon.com\'s Andrew Leonard notes that in the Bridge trilogy, Gibson\'s villains change from multinational corporations and artificial intelligences of the Sprawl trilogy to the mass media – namely tabloid television and the cult of celebrity,Leonard, Andrew (1999-07-27). An engine of anarchy. Books. Salon.com. Virtual Light depicts an "end-stage capitalism, in which private enterprise and the profit motive are taken to their logical conclusion". Leonard\'s review called Idoru a "return to form" for Gibson,Leonard, Andrew (1998-09-14). Is cyberpunk still breathing?. Salon.com. Retrieved on 2007-11-06. while critic Steven Poole asserted that All Tomorrow\'s Parties marked his development from "science-fiction hotshot to wry sociologist of the near future."
Gibson at an Amazon Fishbowl online talk show in Seattle, Washington, 2007-08-06.
…I felt that I was trying to describe an unthinkable present and I actually feel that science fiction\'s best use today is the exploration of contemporary reality rather than any attempt to predict where we are going…The best thing you can do with science today is use it to explore the present. Earth is the alien planet now.
After All Tomorrow\'s Parties, Gibson began to adopt a more realist style of writing, with continuous narratives – "speculative fiction of the very recent past."Dueben, Alex (2007-10-02). An Interview With William Gibson The Father of Cyberpunk. California Literary Review. Retrieved on 2007-10-04. SF critic John Clute has interpreted this approach as Gibson\'s recognition that traditional science fiction is no longer possible "in a world lacking coherent \'nows\' to continue from", characterizing it as "SF for the new century".Clute, John. The Case of the World. Excessive Candour. SciFi.com. Retrieved on 2007-10-14. Gibson\'s novels Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007) were both set in the same contemporary universe – "more or less the same one we live in now"Chang, Angela (2007-01-10). "Q&A: William Gibson". PC Magazine 26 (3). – and put Gibson\'s work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.Hirst, Christopher (2003-05-10). Books: Hardbacks. The Independent. Retrieved on 2007-07-08. As well as the setting, the novels share some of the same characters, including Hubertus Bigend and Pamela Mainwaring – employees of the enigmatic marketing company Blue Ant.
A phenomenon peculiar to this era was the independent development of annotating fansites, PR-Otaku and Node Magazine, devoted to Pattern Recognition and Spook Country respectively. These websites tracked the references and story elements in the novels through online resources such as Google and Wikipedia and collated the results, essentially creating hypertext versions of the books.Lim, Dennis (2007-08-11). Now Romancer. Salon.com. Retrieved on 2007-10-30. Critic John Sutherland characterised this phenomenon as threatening "to completely overhaul the way literary criticism is conducted".Sutherland, John. "Node idea", Guardian Unlimited, Guardian Media Group, 2007-08-31. Retrieved on 2007-11-11.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, with about 100 pages of Pattern Recognition written, Gibson had to re-write the main character\'s backstory, which had been suddenly rendered implausible; he called it "the strangest experience I\'ve ever had with a piece of fiction."Lim, Dennis. "Think Different", The Village Voice, Village Voice Media, 2003-02-18. Retrieved on 2007-11-11. He saw the attacks as a nodal point in history, "an experience out of culture",Leonard, Andrew (2003-02-13). Nodal point. Salon.com. Retrieved on 2007-11-06. and "in some ways... the true beginning of the 21st century."Bennie, Angela (2007-09-07). A reality stranger than fiction. Sydney Morning Herald. Fairfax Media. Retrieved on 2008-01-21. He is noted as one of the first novelists to use the attacks to inform his writing. Examination of cultural changes in post-September 11th America, including the "infantilization of society",William Gibson Hates Futurists. TheTyee.ca. Retrieved on 2007-10-26. became a prominent theme of Gibson\'s work.William Gibson with Spook Country. Studio One Bookclub. CBC British Columbia. Retrieved on 2007-10-26. The focus of his writing nevertheless remains "at the intersection of paranoia and technology".Gibson still scares up a spooky atmosphere. Providence Journal. Retrieved on 2007-10-26.
Bruce Sterling (left) at Robofest \'94. Sterling co-authored with Gibson the short story "Red Star, Winter Orbit" (1983) and the 1990 steampunk novel The Difference Engine.
Three of the stories that later appeared in Burning Chrome were written in collaboration with other authors: "The Belonging Kind" (1981) with John Shirley, "Red Star, Winter Orbit" (1983) with Bruce Sterling,Garreau, Joel. "Through the Looking Glass", The Washington Post, 2007-09-06. Retrieved on 2007-10-30. and "Dogfight" (1985) with Michael Swanwick. Gibson had previously written the foreword to Shirley\'s 1980 novel City Come A-walkin'Gibson, William (1996-03-31). Foreword to City Come a-walkin'. Retrieved on 2007-05-01. and the pair\'s collaboration continued when Gibson wrote the introduction to Shirley\'s short story collection Heatseeker (1989).Brown, Charles N.; William G. Contento (2004-07-10). Stories, Listed by Author. The Locus Index to Science Fiction (1984–1998). Locus. Archived from the original on 2007-03-04. Retrieved on 2007-10-29. Shirley convinced Gibson to write a story for the television series Max Headroom for which Shirley had written several scripts, but the network canceled the series.
Gibson and Sterling collaborated again on the short story "The Angel of Goliad" in 1990, which they soon expanded into the novel-length alternate history story The Difference Engine (1990). The two were later "invited to dream in public" (Gibson) in a joint address to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Convocation on Technology and Education in 1993 ("the Al Gore people"), in which they argued against the digital divideSterling, Bruce; William Gibson (1993-05-10). Speeches by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington D.C. The WELL. Retrieved on 2007-10-29. and "appalled everyone" by proposing that all schools be put online, with education taking place over the Internet. In a 2007 interview, Gibson revealed that Sterling had an idea for "a second recursive science novel that was just a wonderful idea", but that Gibson was unable to pursue the collaboration due to his not being creatively free at the time.
In 1993, Gibson contributed lyrics and featured as a guest vocalist on Yellow Magic Orchestra\'s Technodon album,Yellow Magic Orchestra - Technodon. Discogs. Retrieved on 2008-01-10. and wrote lyrics to the track "Dog Star Girl" for Deborah Harry\'s Debravation.Pener, Degen. "EGOS & IDS; Deborah Harry Is Low-Key -- And Unblond", The New York Times, 1993-08-22. Retrieved on 2007-11-07.
Pinball machine based on the film Johnny Mnemonic (1995), an adaptation by Robert Longo from Gibson\'s short story of the same name.
Gibson\'s early efforts to write film scripts failed to manifest themselves as finished product. For example, "Burning Chrome" (which was to be directed by Kathryn Bigelow) and "Neuro-Hotel" were two attempts by the author at film adaptations that were never made.Gibson, William. Interview with Giuseppe Salza. Cannes. May 1994. (Interview). Retrieved on 2007-10-28. In the late 1980s he wrote an early version of Alien³ (which he later characterized as "Tarkovskian"), few elements of which survived in the final version. Gibson\'s early involvement with the film industry extended far beyond the confines of the Hollywood blockbuster system. At one point, he collaborated on a script with Kazakh director Rashid Nugmanov after an American producer had expressed an interest in a Soviet-American collaboration to star Russian-Korean star Victor Tsoi.Gibson, William (2003-03-06). Victor Tsoi. Retrieved on 2007-12-03. Despite being occupied with writing a novel, Gibson was reluctant to abandon the "wonderfully odd project" which involved "ritualistic gang-warfare in some sort of sideways-future Leningrad" and sent Jack Womack to Russia in his stead. Rather than producing a motion picture, a prospect that ended with Tsoi\'s death in an automotive accident, Womack\'s experiences in Russia ultimately culminated in his novel Let\'s Put the Future Behind Us and informed much of the Russian content of Gibson\'s Pattern Recognition. A similarly doomed fate befell Gibson\'s mooted collaboration with Japanese filmmaker Sogo Ishii in 1991, a film they plotted on shooting in the Walled City of Kowloon prior to its demolition by the Chinese government.Gibson, William (2006-07-21). Burst City Trailer. Retrieved on 2007-11-26.
Adaptations of Gibson\'s fiction have frequently been optioned and proposed, to limited success. Two of the author\'s short stories, both set in the Sprawl trilogy universe, have been loosely adapted as films: Johnny Mnemonic (1995) with screenplay by Gibson and starring Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren and Takeshi Kitano, and New Rose Hotel (1998), starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, and Asia Argento. The former was the first time in history that a book was launched simultaneously as a film and a CD-ROM interactive video game.Walker, Martin (1996-09-03). Blade Runner on electro-steroids. Mail & Guardian Online. M&G Media. Retrieved on 2007-11-11. Neuromancer, after a long stay in development hell, is in the process of adaptation as of 2007,Neuromancer comes. JoBlo.com. Retrieved on 2007-08-27. Count Zero was at one point being developed as The Zen Differential with director Michael Mann attached, and the third novel in the Sprawl trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive, has also been optioned and bought. An anime adaptation of Idoru was announced as in development in 2006,William Gibson’s Idoru Coming to Anime. cyberpunkreview.com (2006-04-21). and Pattern Recognition was in the process of development by director Peter Weir, although according to Gibson the latter is no longer attached to the project.Gibson, William (2007-05-01). I\'ve Forgotten More Neuromancer Film Deals Than You\'ve Ever Heard Of. Retrieved on 2007-11-04.
Gibson co-wrote, with friend Tom Maddox, the X-Files episodes "Kill Switch" and "First Person Shooter", broadcasted in the U.S. on 20th Century Fox Television in 1998 and 2000.Fridman, Sherman (2000-02-24). "X-Files" Writer Fights For Online Privacy. News Briefs. Newsbytes PM. Archived from the original on 2004-09-22. Retrieved on 2007-07-13. In 1998 he contributed the introduction to the spin-off publication Art of the X-Files. Gibson made a cameo appearance in the television miniseries Wild Palms at the behest of creator Bruce Wagner.Gibson, William (2006-07-22). Where The Holograms Go. Retrieved on 2007-11-26. Director Oliver Stone had borrowed heavily from Gibson\'s novels to make the series,Platt, Adam. "Cyberhero", The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, 1993-09-16, p. 24. Retrieved on 2007-11-06. Archived from the original on 1999-02-23. and in the aftermath of its cancellation Gibson contributed an article, "Where The Holograms Go", to the Wild Palms Reader. He accepted another acting role in 2002, appearing alongside Douglas Coupland in the short film Mon Amour Mon Parapluie in which the pair played philosophers.Cast. Mon Amour Mon Parapluie. Retrieved on 2007-10-26. Appearances in fiction aside, Gibson was the focus of a biographical documentary film by Mark Neale in 2000 called No Maps for These Territories. The documentary follows Gibson over the course of a drive across North America discussing various aspects of his life, literary career and cultural interpretations. It features interviews with Jack Womack and Bruce Sterling, as well as recitations from Neuromancer by Bono and The Edge.
Gibson has often collaborated with performance artists such as theatre group La Fura dels Baus, here performing at the Singapore Arts Festival in May 2007.
Gibson has contributed text to be integrated into a number of performance art pieces. In October 1989, Gibson wrote text for such a collaboration with acclaimed sculptor and future Johnny Mnemonic director Robert Longovan Bakel, Rogier (June 1995). "Remembering Johnny". Wired (3.06). Retrieved on 2008-01-10. titled Dream Jumbo: Working the Absolutes, which was displayed in Royce Hall, University of California Los Angeles. Three years later, Gibson contributed original text to "Memory Palace", a performance show featuring the theater group La Fura dels Baus at Art Futura \'92, Barcelona, which featured images by Karl Sims, Rebecca Allen, Mark Pellington with music by Peter Gabriel and others. It was at Art Futura \'92 that Gibson met Charlie Athanas, who would later adapt "Burning Chrome" for the stage. Gibson\'s latest contribution was in 1997, a collaboration with Vancouver-based contemporary dance company Holy Body Tattoo and Gibson\'s friend and future webmaster Christopher Halcrow.Gibson, William (2003-05-31). Holy Body Tattoo. Retrieved on 2007-11-11.
In 1990, Gibson contributed to "Visionary San Francisco", an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shown from June 14 to August 26.Polledri, Paolo (1990). Visionary San Francisco. Munich: Prestal. ISBN 3791310607. OCLC 22115872. He wrote a short story, "Skinner\'s Room", set in a decaying San Francisco in which the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was closed and taken over by the homeless – a setting Gibson then detailed in the Bridge trilogy. The story inspired a contribution to the exhibition by architects Ming Fung and Craig Hodgetts that envisioned a San Francisco in which the rich live in high-tech, solar-powered towers, above the decrepit city and its crumbling bridge. The exhibition featured Gibson on a monitor discussing the future and reading from "Skinner\'s Room".S. Page. William Gibson Bibliography / Mediagraphy. Retrieved on 2008-02-09. The New York Times hailed the exhibition as "one of the most ambitious, and admirable, efforts to address the realm of architecture and cities that any museum in the country has mounted in the last decade", despite calling Ming and Hodgetts\'s reaction to Gibson\'s contribution "a powerful, but sad and not a little cynical, work".Goldberger, Paul. "In San Francisco, A Good Idea Falls With a Thud", Architecture View, The New York Times, 1990-08-12. Retrieved on 2007-11-06. A slightly different version of the short story was featured a year later in Omni.Gibson, William (November 1991). "Skinner\'s Room". Omni.
A particularly well-received work by Gibson was Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (1992), a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem that was his contribution to a collaborative project with artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr.Liu, Alan (2004-06-30). The laws of cool : knowledge work and the culture of information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 339-48. ISBN 0226486982. OCLC 53823956. Gibson\'s text focused on the ethereal nature of memories (the title refers to a photo album) and was originally published on a 3.5" floppy disk embedded in the back of an artist\'s book containing etchings by Ashbaugh (intended to fade from view once the book was opened and exposed to light – they never did, however). Gibson commented that Ashbaugh\'s design "eventually included a supposedly self-devouring floppy-disk intended to display the text only once, then eat itself."Gibson, William (1992). Introduction to Agrippa: A Book of the Dead. Retrieved on 2007-11-11. Contrary to numerous colorful reports, the diskettes were never actually "hacked"; instead the poem was manually transcribed from a surreptitious videotape of a p
