William Gibson Quotes

It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.

There is a great deal of cyberpunk that I admire, especially the work of William Gibson which I think is excellent. Somehow he speaks from his own heart and cyber punk is what comes out.

Gibson wrote 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter, you know, before the technology he was writing about existed.

My favourite book in the world is 'Neuromancer' by William Gibson.

I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.

At one point I intended to write precursor and sequel novels, about the establishment of the Web and its next evolution, but I am very unlikely to now; they would take place in a different universe.

I was standing on the shoulders of other science fiction writers like William Gibson, who had written 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter before home computers even really existed, and Neal Stephenson who wrote 'Snow Crash' in the early '90s and imagined an online virtual world before the birth of the modern Internet.

I love William Gibson.

When I wrote 'Neuromancer', I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense, I intended 'Neuromancer', among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me.

I always like Iain Banks science fiction stuff and William Gibson's cyberpunk stuff from the 1980s.

One of the things I liked about the movie 'Minority Report' was they used a lot of futurists as consultants to really try to understand what the world really would be like in 50 years.

I grew up before computers. Computers are changing things, not all for the good.

Our technologised society is becoming opaque. As technology becomes more ubiquitous and our relationship with digital devices ever more seamless, our technical infrastructure seems to be increasingly intangible.

What is sure is that technological change is accelerating in all directions and, like children playing in a fountain, consumers are reveling in the experience.

My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.

Science fiction writers missed the most salient feature of our modern era: the Internet.

Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.

The central political problem of our time is how to adapt our venerable democracy to the acceleration of the information age. Modern technology creates a supply of new tools for improved governance, but it also creates an urgent demand for putting these tools to use. We need better policies to obtain the benefits of innovation as quickly as possible and to manage the social problems that speedier innovation will inevitably create—from pollution to weapons of mass destruction.

Any real virtual reality enthusiast can look back at VR science fiction. It's not about playing games... 'The Matrix,' 'Snow Crash,' all this fiction was not about sitting in a room playing video games. It's about being in a parallel digital world that exists alongside our own, communicating with other people, playing with other people.

I'm a little bit nervous for us with all of this electronically generated new hyper-space that we've moved into, where not only people but also economies and systems, like banking, are left to zeros and ones. I want to be more than a zero or one.

We are living in a science fiction world.

I wanted to do 'Matrix' because when I saw the first one, I was in Paris, and I came out from the movie and said, 'Wow - I've never seen something like that; it's so incredible.'

I remember leaving the first 'Matrix' movie feeling completely radicalized, completely changed. I think we all, from our ordinary lives, like to think about putting ourselves into these extraordinary situations and wonder how we'd respond.

Honestly, I would never say, 'Oh, I've decided not to read 'The Left Hand of Darkness' because I've seen 'Blade Runner.' I've decided not to read 'Neuromancer' because I've seen 'Blade Runner.''