William Gibson gets the Woodcock
March 11th, 2024
International bestseller of speculative fiction, and the author credited with inventing the term “cyberspace,” William Gibson will be presented with the 2024 George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia at the Vancouver Public Library later this summer.
With the publication of his first novel Neuromancer (1984), Gibson achieved unprecedented success by winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best Science Fiction novel of the year, plus the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award for best original Science Fiction paperback. In this debut, Gibson prophesied the transformational effects of the coming information age before they happened. Critics credit him with “renovating” science fiction/speculative fiction and elevating its literary qualities.
Author of 13 novels and one co-authored novel, many of which have been international bestsellers, and several of which have been made into feature films and TV series, Gibson has also published one book of short fiction and two of nonfiction, and has written numerous scripts for films and TV series. He also regularly contributes articles on social and political issues to The New York Times, Wired, Rolling Stone and The Guardian.
Gibson grew up in North Carolina but has for 50 years lived in BC. He took his degree from UBC, wrote his first published work as a UBC assignment, and based his entire writing career from Vancouver. While Vancouver is not explicitly used as a locale in his earlier novels because they are set in a theoretical future, his settings have a soggy, dark quality familiar to anyone who has spent a winter in Vancouver. Some of Gibson’s later work does specifically reference Vancouver.
He has been described as the “noir prophet” of the speculative fiction sub-genre, cyberpunk, and his work influences more than the literary world, reaching into design, film, music and technology. BC BookWorld has noted that William Gibson, at the turn of the Millennium, was one of the two most famous living authors of British Columbia (the other being Douglas Coupland).
William Gibson with Douglas Coupland, circa 2010 – 2015. Photo by Mac Parry
My love to Deborah, from an old UBC chum!
BK