William Gibson

Gibson the Great. Is there any other way to describe the futurist who gave us the term 'cyberspace' before there was one?

William Gibson is an American writer, often classified as science fiction, though I would prefer to say futurist who lives now in Canada and has for over the last thirty years provided the most accurate predictive near future stories. (Near future: the present plus ten years or twenty years).
Some futurist/sci fi writers like to go further ahead so that they can bypass the period where humankind overcomes thorny technical and social issues in order to write about the challenges of the medium to far away 'then'. Gibson does not shy away from the soon to be now & all its complications, though some of his work does deal in smaller leaps, all are bitingly accurate appraisals of reality driven issues that plague us, such as climate change & the impact of technology.

This does not mean that he never gets it wrong. By being bold enough to take on problems that will be resolved in the near future, he gambles & lives to see if he was right - which is he is, more often than not - however, he is also asking us and challenging us, by his suggestions.

His last work, The Peripheral (2014), was highly acclaimed - even reviewed by the NYRB (yep, the New York Review of Books reviewing 'sci-fi'), and it was awesome in its ideas and scope. Having read everything he has ever done, and having routinely seen his impact on so many others in their writings & their name dropping of him in interviews, I can highly recommend to anyone to go back and read all the work of this guru. Meanwhile, I pray he is writing more as we speak.

One note of interest. Though I am not at liberty to disclose it specifically, and look forward to having the internet to be able to research this further as I am sure I am not the only one to have noticed it, in one of his books he hits on a llittle-known program by US intelligence agencies in their Faustian bargain best post 9-11. Either he really had a crystal ball, or very high level sources that even the NYT and Post didn't, it can only be one of those two.