Our debt to William Gibson
William Gibson is one of my favorite SciFi authors. I wasn’t always a fan, I was introduced to him relatively recently (within the last seven years). I haven’t read all of his works yet, but I’m getting there. We owe a lot of Gibson, an American ex-pat like me who lives in Vancouver, in fact I’d venture to say we owe a lot of how we conceive of the Internet thanks to him.
Gibson was the first to use the term “cyberspace” in his book Neuromancer. His Bridge Trilogy envisioned a world where the virtual and the real worlds being to intersect. Long before Second Life was close to becoming a reality, Gibson wrote about companies having “virtual” offices and avatars, Idoru, wanting to become “real”.
I’ve always been enamored with Gibson’s vision of the future. Even as bad as the movie Johnny Mnemonic was, the concept of grabbing data from the air, pulling it together, and making new things is how I envision the Internet and how I brainstorm.
As strange as it sounds, and looks even stranger believe me, I start my brainstorming process by pacing on the deck and reaching and pulling pieces in the air. One part of a project there, another there, connect these two. Yes, it’s all from Gibson. Yes, it was also done in Minority Report, but I saw that much later.
Today the term “cyberspace” isn’t as in vogue as it once was, but despite that Second Life has virtual offices of real things (companies, political campaign offices, even government) the Minority Report/Johnny Mnemonic vision of controlling computers and information with your hands, is in prototype stage.
William Gibson, a man who’s works, I feel, have inspired generations of geeks to bring his worlds to life
