SOURCE: Gibson, William, and Larry McCaffery. “An Interview with William Gibson.” In Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, edited by Larry McCaffery, pp. 130-50. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

In the following interview, Gibson discusses the concept of cyberspace, the cyberpunk movement, and the influence of popular culture on his writing.

In 1984 William Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, burst onto the science fiction scene like a supernova. The shock waves from that explosion had an immediate impact on the relatively insular SF field. Neuromancer became the first novel to win the triple crown—Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards—and, in the process, virtually single-handedly launched the cyberpunk movement. Neuromancer, with its stunning technopoetic prose surface and its superspecific evocation of life in a sleazed-out global village of the near future, has rapidly gained unprecedented critical and popular attention outside SF.

Prior to...