6 Essential Works by 2019 SFWA Grand Master William Gibson

Neuromancer
The first sentence of Gibson’s first novel is oft-cited alongside other perfect opening lines: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

Burning Chrome
Though it has passed out of common parlance, for a long time we referred to the internet as “cyberspace,” a term that was coined in a short story featured in this collection and gained more traction when it reappeared in Neuromancer. (Due to the vagaries of publishing dates, the short story “Burning Chrome” was published first in Omni in 1982, two years before Neuromancer, but only widely republished in this collection two years after that.) Burning Chrome includes one of my top five favorite short stories ever: “The Gernsback Continuum”, about a phtotojournalist who begins hallucinating the futurism of the past superimposed upon the present. This is a wonderful collection of short fiction, full up with brio sketches of the people and places Gibson will become best known for; a cyberpunk grimoire.

The Difference Engine (with Bruce Sterling)
In The Difference Engine, Gibson and Sterling twisted cyberpunk into something both new and old, imagining the intrusion of various disruptive technologies well before they were culturally widespread. Which is to say: its Victorians have developed punch-card computers they use in the service of typically Victorian notions of class and criminality, like they would, those stuffy Victorians. It was here I first encountered Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, and the mathematician considered by some to be the first programmer. And thus, steampunk was born. (Gibson’s most famous aphorism—“The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed”—holds true even in the past.) As a novel, The Difference Engine maybe isn’t the most compelling, but the ideas, man. The ideas.

All Tomorrow’s Parties
All Tomorrow’s Parties, which takes it name from a Velvet Underground song, is the culmination of Gibson’s Bridge trilogy, which aptly enough centers on the eponymous Bay Bridge, which has been commandeered as a sort of vertical, spanning shantytown in the wake of earthquakes that decimated both California and Tokyo. The book collects the disparate people and themes of the previous two novels into a loose slipknot of an ending. Gibson’s finales don’t tend to the explosive, and a common complaint is that they end inconclusively. But I think his endings are more like creeper highs, best appreciated at a bit of a remove, after they’ve had time to expand in your mind. One of the endings within All Tomorrow’s Parties has stayed with me for years, for so long that I eventually had my own private name for what in the hell he was doing, and what it meant to me. Gibson really is a visionary, though I suspect that label would annoy him.

Pattern Recognition
Pattern Recognition marked a sea-change in Gibson’s fiction, pulling back from the techno-future to the almost present. Heretofore, much of his fiction seemed set 20 minutes into the future, riding technology and its warping effects into near-future almost-nows. Pattern Recognition, instead, is on the bleeding edge of the then-present, which still feels like our now, detailing technologies out of the reach of the average human, but not impossible or unheard of. I think it is the first novel I read after 9/11 that incorporated the fall of the Twin Towers into its overt plot: main character Cayce Pollard’s CIA spook dad vanished after the attack, like he simply couldn’t exist in a post-9/11 world. There’s some winking to his first trilogy: Cayce pronounces her name like Neuromancer‘s own Henry Case. But Cayce lives in the here and now, in the unevenly distributed present. (And, speaking of the Bleeding Edge, there’s some back and forth between Pattern Recognition and the works of post-modern master Thomas Pynchon, but that’s a whole other rabbit hole to explore.)

The Peripheral
After completing the Blue Ant trilogy, which takes place in the here-and-now-ish, The Peripheral strikes back out into not just one, but two futures. The Peripheral is also the first Gibson novel to take on the post-apocalyptic themes, at least overtly. (One could certainly argue that the Sprawl is at the most basic a mid-apocalyptic hellscape, though that might be semantics.) It shifts forward and more forward in time, from before the vague occurrence of the cataclysm called the Jackpot, to after, in a largely empty world. After the almost comforting familiarity of his proceeding books, The Peripheral felt like a leap into the black both structurally and thematically, experimental in ways I hadn’t quite seen before in Gibson’s work. I can’t wait to see what he does when he returns to its setting in Agency, which will be partially set in an alternate timeline in which Hillary Clinton won the 2016 presidential election. The book is currently scheduled for release in January 2020, though it has been delayed a few times already. Planning the future—more than one, actually—takes time, you know.

Distrust That Particular Flavor
This work of non-fiction collects several decades’ worth of Gibson’s essays—everything from a late ’80s musing about the future of “the Net” (remember when we called it that?) to his thoughtful writing about music and literature. Though he’s not as prone to essaying in his fiction as some other cyberpunk authors (*cough* Neal Stephenson), he’s not bad at the form.

Archangel (co-written by Michael St. John Smith, with art by Butch Guice, Alejandro Barrionuevo  and Wagner Reis)
Gibson’s only foray into comics to date. There’s something of a genre joke in the setup: Junior Henderson goes back in time and kills his grandfather, only to replace him. This premise might be is one of the hoariest old chestnuts of time travel fiction, so naturally, Gibson duly blows it to pieces, as he does.