It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places of her life, like a familiar cafe that exists someone outside geography and beyond time zones. There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F:, and some muchlarger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat. But there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. the hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counmter-purposes, deter her.

His thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors design academia cyberculture and technology. During this period he worked at various jobs including a three-year stint as teaching assistant on a film history course at his alma mater. " Literary critic Larry McCaffery described the concept of the matrix in Neuromancer as a place where "data dance with human consciousness.

After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the dystopic Sprawl trilogy Gibson became an important author of another science fiction sub-genre—steampunk—with the 1990 alternate history novel The Difference Engine written with Bruce Sterling. His most recent novels—Pattern Recognition (2003) Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010)—are set in a contemporary world and have put his work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding school in Arizona Gibson evaded the draft during the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada in 1968 where he became immersed in the counterculture.