William Gibson Says Today's Internet Is Nothing Like What He Envisioned

"William Gibson writes visionary stories — in his early work, he imagined an information superhighway long before the Web existed. But in a dozen novels over the last 35 years, Gibson has stalked closer and closer to the present."

"His latest, Agency, has a complicated plot that jumps between the far future and the immediate present; Gibson says his favorite type of science fiction requires time and effort to understand. 'My greatest pleasure in reading books by other people is to be dropped into a completely baffling scenario,' he says, 'and to experience something very genuinely akin to culture shock when first visiting a new culture.'"

"Gibson imagined that sort of culture shock back in 1982 when he coined the word "cyberspace" in a short story. Two years later he popularized the term in his first novel, Neuromancer, about a washed up hacker hired for one last job."

"Neuromancer won a trio of major science fiction prizes — the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award — and launched the genre that became known as cyberpunk. It was also a major influence on the 1999 film The Matrix."