Wikipedia:Today's featured article/July 25, 2008



William Gibson (born 1948) is an American-Canadian 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. Gibson is best known for depicting a visualised, worldwide communications network before it became ubiquitous in the 1990s, and he is credited with anticipating and establishing the conceptual foundations of the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular. Gibson's early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of cybernetics and computer networks on humans – "lowlife meets high tech". Gibson is one of the most highly acclaimed North 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 more than twenty 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 thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors, academia, cyberculture, and technology. (more...)

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