William Gibson

William Gibson was born in a vacation town on the coast of South Carolina. He spent the first few years of his life moving around Virginia because of his father’s job as a manager of a construction company, but when Gibson was six his father died, and his mother moved them to Wytheville, Virginia, where she and Gibson’s father were born and raised. Gibson was a bookish child, obsessed with science fiction. However, he didn’t put the same kind of obsessive focus into school, and so his mother sent him to boarding school in southern Arizona. Gibson’s mother died when he was eighteen, and he left school without graduating. He moved to Canada to dodge the draft for the Vietnam War. He spent the sixties as a self-proclaimed hippie, before marrying a woman from Vancouver and moving there with her. He received a degree in English at the University of British Columbia and began to try his hand at writing. He published a series of short stories before being commissioned to write a novel—a work that would turn into Neuromancer, a surprise smash hit. Since then, Gibson has remained in Vancouver, and written over a dozen additional novels and a handful of short stories.