SOURCE: Bredehoft, Thomas A. “The Gibson Continuum: Cyberspace and Gibson's Mervyn Kihn Stories.” Science-Fiction Studies 22, no. 2 (July 1995): 252–63.

In the following essay, Bredehoft explores Gibson's vision of cyberspace in the stories “The Gernsback Continuum” and “Hippie Hat Brain Parasite.”

I was going to use a quote from an old Velvet Underground song—“Watch out for worlds behind you” (from “Sunday Morning”)—as an epigraph for Neuromancer.

(William Gibson, quoted in McCaffery 265)

In a 1986 interview with Larry McCaffery, William Gibson recalled the conflict between his expectations and his first impressions of his own computer:

It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside—this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a...