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Sci Fi Focus   >   Encyclopedia   >   William Gibson
William Gibson (1948-) is an American science fiction author who lives in Canada, and who has been called the father of the Cyberpunk movement.

Gibson's most influential novel, was his first, Neuromancer. His short story *JOHN MNEMONIC* was the inspiration for the film of the same name.


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William Gibson


Spook Country

By William Gibson

Berkley Trade
Paperback (384 pages)

Spook Country
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Amazon.com:
Now that the present has caught up with William Gibson's vision of the future, which made him the most influential science fiction writer of the past quarter century, he has started writing about a time--our time--in which everyday life feels like science fiction. With his previous novel, Pattern Recognition, the challenge of writing about the present-day world drove him to create perhaps his best novel yet, and in Spook Country he remains at the top of his game. It's a stripped-down thriller that reads like the best DeLillo (or the best Gibson), with the lives of a half-dozen evocative characters connected by a tightly converging plot and by the general senses of unease and wonder in our networked, post-9/11 time.

Across the Border to Spook Country

For the last few decades, William Gibson, who grew up in Virginia and elsewhere in the United States, has lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, just across the border from Amazon.com's Seattle headquarters, which made for a short drive for a lunchtime interview before the release of Spook Country. We met just a few miles from where the storylines of the new novel, in a rare scene set in Gibson's own city, converge. You can read the full transcript of the interview, in which we discussed, among other things, writing in the age of Google, visiting the Second Life virtual world, the possibilities of science fiction in an age of rapid change, and his original proposal for Spook Country, which we have available for viewing on our site. Here are a few excerpts from the interview:

Amazon.com: Could you start by telling us a little bit about the scenario of the new book?

William Gibson: It's a book in which shadowy and mysterious characters are using New York's smallest crime family, a sort of boutique operation of smugglers and so-called illegal facilitators, to get something into North America. And you have to hang around to the end of the book to find out what they're doing. So I guess it's a caper novel in that regard.

Amazon.com: The line on your last book, Pattern Recognition was that the present had caught up with William Gibson's future. So many of the things you imagined have come true that in a way it seems like we're all living in science fiction now. Is that the way you felt when you came to write that book, that the real world had caught up with your ideas?

Gibson: Well, I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up. And I found that to absolutely be the case. If I'm going to write fiction set in an imaginary future now, I'm going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate sense of how weird things are now. 'Cause I'm going to have to go beyond that. And I think over the course of these last two books--I don't think I'm done yet--I've been getting a yardstick together. But I don't know if I'll be able to do it again. I don't know if I'll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way. In the '80s and '90s--as strange as it may seem to say this--we had such luxury of stability. Things weren't changing quite so quickly in the '80s and '90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don't have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.

Amazon.com: Now that you're writing about the present, do you consider yourself a science fiction writer these days? Because the marketplace still does.

Gibson: I never really believed in the separation. But science fiction is definitely where I'm from. Science fiction is my native literary culture. It's what I started reading, and I think the thing that actually makes me a bit different than some of the science fiction writers I've met who are my own age is that I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and William Burroughs in the same week. And I started reading Beat poets a year later, and got that in the mix. That really changed the direction. But it seems like such an old-fashioned way of looking at things. And it's better not to be pinned down. It's a matter of where you're allowed to park. If you can park in the science fiction bookstore, that's good. If you can park in the other bookstore, that's really good. If people come and buy it at Amazon, that's really good.

I'm sure I must have readers from 20 years ago who are just despairing of the absence of cyberstuff, or girls with bionic fingernails. But that just the way it is. All of that stuff reads so differently now. I think nothing dates more quickly than science fiction. Nothing dates more quickly than an imaginary future. It's acquiring a patina of quaintness even before you've got it in the envelope to send to the publisher.

Amazon.com: So do you think that's your own career path, that you're less interested in imagining a future, or do you think that the world is changing?

Gibson: I think it's actually both. Until fairly recently, I had assumed that it was me, me being drawn to use this toolkit I'd acquired when I was a teenager, and using my old SF toolkit in some kind of attempt at naturalism, 21st-century naturalistic fiction. But over the last five to six years it's started to seem to me that there's something else going on as well, that maybe we're in what the characters in my novel Idoru call a "nodal point," or a series of them. We're in a place where things could just go anywhere. A couple of weeks ago I happened to read Charlie Stross's argument as to why he believes that there will never, ever be any manned space travel. It's not going to happen. We're not going to colonize Mars. All of that is just a big fantasy. And it's so convincing. I read that and I'm like, "My god, there goes so much of the fiction I read as a child."

Neuromancer

By William Gibson

Ace Hardcover
Hardcover (384 pages)

Neuromancer
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Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction: the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same.

Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price....

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"The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus- hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace . . . Case had been the sharpest data-thief in the business, until vengeful former employees crippled his nervous system. But now a new and very mysterious employer recruits him for a last-chance run. The target: an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting Earth in service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool business clan. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction. Hotwired to the leading edges of art and technology, Neuromancer ranks with 1984 and Brave New World as one of the century's most potent visions of the future. "

Pattern Recognition

By William Gibson

Berkley
Paperback (384 pages)

Pattern Recognition
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The first of William Gibson's usually futuristic novels to be set in the present, Pattern Recognition is a masterful snapshot of modern consumer culture and hipster esoterica. Set in London, Tokyo, and Moscow, Pattern Recognition takes the reader on a tour of a global village inhabited by power-hungry marketeers, industrial saboteurs, high-end hackers, Russian mob bosses, Internet fan-boys, techno archeologists, washed-out spies, cultural documentarians, and our heroine Cayce Pollard--a soothsaying "cool hunter" with an allergy to brand names.

Pollard is among a cult-like group of Internet obsessives that strives to find meaning and patterns within a mysterious collection of video moments, merely called "the footage," let loose onto the Internet by an unknown source. Her hobby and work collide when a megalomaniac client hires her to track down whoever is behind the footage. Cayce's quest will take her in and out of harm's way in a high-stakes game that ultimately coincides with her desire to reconcile her father's disappearance during the September 11 attacks in New York.

Although he forgoes his usual future-think tactics, this is very much a William Gibson novel, more so for fans who realize that Gibson's brilliance lies not in constructing new futures but in using astute observations of present-day cultural flotsam to create those futures. With Pattern Recognition, Gibson skips the extrapolation and focuses his acumen on our confusing contemporary world, using the precocious Pollard to personify and humanize the uncertain anxiety, optimistic hope, and downright fear many feel when looking to the future. The novel is filled with Gibson's lyric descriptions and astute observations of modern life, making it worth the read for both cool hunters and their prey. --Jeremy Pugh

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Cayce Pollard (pronounced 'case") is a legend in the field of market research, paid handsomely to recognize cultural and social patterns that corporations can turn into cash. Google her and you find 'coolhunter," and you may see it suggested that she is a 'sensitive" of some kind, a dowserin the world of global marketing. The truth, according to her friends, is that her sensitivity is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the symbols of the marketplace. Hired by Blue Ant, the world's hippest ad agency, for the sort of high-corporate re-branding she's known for, a more intriguing project emerges when the head of the firm asks her to determine who's producing a mysterious series of video fragments that have gripped the imaginations of people around the world. The source of this footage, carefully concealed, has so far proven untraceable. For Cayce's worryingly brilliant employer, the footage is the most effective piece of guerilla marketing ever devised. For Cayce herself, the footage has a powerful emotional resonance as she attempts to come to terms with the apparent death of her father - a former U.S. security expert with ties to the intelligence community - in the collapse of the World Trade Center. But what if the sense of nascent meaning that she and others perceive in the footage is only an illusion of meaningfulness - in other words, faulty pattern recognition? As Cayce begins her hunt for the mysterious 'maker", she enlists the help of an odd array of characters, including a young Polish sculptor who works in primitive personal computers , an alcoholic ex-NSA guru hidden away in a rusting house-trailer in the British countryside, an attractive Chinese-American hacker-entrepreneur whose loyalty she questions, and her fellow footage-enthusiast Parkaboy, whom she's come to know (but only, so far, virtually) on a web site devoted to discussion of 'the footage". When her rivalry with a fellow worker at the advertising agency ta

A Modern Method for Guitar - Volumes 1, 2, 3 Complete

By William Leavitt

Berklee Press Publications
Paperback (432 pages)

A Modern Method for Guitar - Volumes 1, 2, 3 Complete
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Now guitarists can have all three volumes of this classic guitar method in one convenient book! Created by popular demand, this new edition of the method used as the basic text for the renowned Berklee College of Music guitar program is a complete compilation of the original Volumes 1, 2, and 3. Innovative solos, duets and exercises progressively teach melody, harmony and rhythm. Perfect for the serious guitar student and instructor alike.

The Miracle Worker

By William Gibson

Pocket
Mass Market Paperback (128 pages)

The Miracle Worker
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NO ONE COULD REACH HER

Twelve-year-old Helen Keller lived in a prison of silence and darkness. Born deaf, blind, and mute, with no way to express herself or comprehend those around her, she flew into primal rages against anyone who tried to help her, fighting tooth and nail with a strength born of furious, unknowing desperation.

Then Annie Sullivan came. Half-blind herself, but possessing an almost fanatical determination, she would begin a frightening and incredibly moving struggle to tame the wild girl no one could reach, and bring Helen into the world at last....

Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge School Shakespeare)

By William Shakespeare

Cambridge University Press
Paperback (228 pages)

Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge School Shakespeare)
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Modern editions of a popular and trusted series. This new edition of Romeo and Juliet is part of the established Cambridge School Shakespeare series and has been substantially updated with new and revised activities throughout. Remaining faithful to the series' active approach it treats the play as a script to be acted, explored and enjoyed. As well as the complete script of Romeo and Juliet, you will find a variety of classroom-tested activities, an eight-page colour section and an enlarged selection of notes including information on characters, performance, history and language.

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The cast of this unabridged recording of Romeo and Juliet features Michael Sheen and Kate Beckinsale in the title roles, with Fiona Shaw, Norman Rodway, David Bradley and Frances Barber.

Hamlet (Cambridge School Shakespeare)

By William Shakespeare

Cambridge University Press
Paperback (276 pages)

Hamlet (Cambridge School Shakespeare)
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Modern editions of a popular and trusted series. This new edition of Hamlet is part of the established Cambridge School Shakespeare series and has been substantially updated with new and revised activities throughout. Remaining faithful to the series' active approach it treats the play as a script to be acted, explored and enjoyed. As well as the complete script of Hamlet, you will find a variety of classroom-tested activities, an eight-page colour section and an enlarged selection of notes including information on characters, performance, history and language.

Mona Lisa Overdrive

By William Gibson

Spectra
Released: 1997-02-06
Mass Market Paperback (320 pages)

Mona Lisa Overdrive
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Into the cyber-hip world of William Gibson comes Mona, a young girl with a murky past and an uncertain future whose life is on a collision course with internationally famous Sense/Net star Angie Mitchell. Since childhood, Angie has been able to tap into cyberspace without a computer. Now, from inside cyberspace, a kidnapping plot is masterminded by a phantom entity who has plans for Mona, Angie, and all humanity, plans that cannot be controlled...or even known. And behind the intrigue lurks the shadowy Yakuza, the powerful Japanese underworld, whose leaders ruthlessly manipulate people and events to suit their own purposes.

An over-the-top thrill ride sequel to Neuromancer and Count Zero.

Macbeth (Cambridge School Shakespeare)

By William Shakespeare

Cambridge University Press
Paperback (192 pages)

Macbeth (Cambridge School Shakespeare)
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Modern editions of a popular and trusted series. This new edition of Macbeth is part of the established Cambridge School Shakespeare series and has been substantially updated with new and revised activities throughout. Remaining faithful to the series' active approach it treats the play as a script to be acted, explored and enjoyed. As well as the complete script of Macbeth, you will find a variety of classroom-tested activities, an eight-page colour section and an enlarged selection of notes including information on characters, performance, history and language.

The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, A Concise History, Volume II: Since 1340

By Lynn Hunt, Barbara H. Rosenwein & Bonnie G. Smith

Bedford/St. Martin's
Paperback (645 pages)
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