One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy

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.