William Gibson: Beyond Cyberspace

It's nearly 30 years since the word "cyberspace" first appeared in print, in a short story by William Gibson for the July 1982 edition of the now-defunct science fiction magazine Omni. In an interview in this summer's Paris Review, Gibson describes, not for the first time, how he came up with the word: "The first thing I did was to sit down with a yellow pad and a Sharpie and start scribbling – infospace, dataspace. I think I got cyberspace on the third try, and I thought, oh, that's a really weird word. I liked the way it felt in the mouth – I thought it sounded like it meant something while still being essentially hollow." The trajectory from Omni to the Paris Review says less about the way Gibson has changed in the intervening years than about the way science fiction has, both in itself and in terms of its status in the wider culture – in large part thanks to Gibson's nine novels. The last six of them – Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), All Tomorrow's Parties (1999), collectively known as the Bridge trilogy, Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010) – have recently been reissued by Penguin in a new uniform edition. Gibson's influence is evident in everything from the Matrix movies to Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Good Squad, which won this year's Pulitzer prize for fiction.