Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans, a "combination of lowlife and high tech"[4]—and helped to create an iconography for the Information Age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s.

[8][13] Gibson later described Wytheville as "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted" and credits the beginnings of his relationship with science fiction, his "native literary culture",[13][verification needed] with the subsequent feeling of abrupt exile.

[15][16] A shy, ungainly teenager, Gibson grew up in a monoculture he found "highly problematic",[14] consciously rejected religion and took refuge in reading science fiction as well as writers such as Burroughs and Henry Miller.

[7] Gibson has recounted that they concentrated their travels on European nations with fascist regimes and favorable exchange rates, including spending time on a Greek archipelago and in Istanbul in 1970,[24] as they "couldn't afford to stay anywhere that had anything remotely like hard currency".

[24] Realizing that it was easier to sustain high college grades, and thus qualify for generous student financial aid, than to work,[16] he enrolled at the University of British Columbia (UBC), earning "a desultory bachelor's degree in English"[7] in 1977.

[9] After considering pursuing a master's degree on the topic of hard science fiction novels as fascist literature,[16] Gibson discontinued writing in the year that followed graduation and, as one critic put it, expanded his collection of punk records.

His themes of hi-tech shanty towns, recorded or broadcast stimulus (later to be developed into the "sim-stim" package featured so heavily in Neuromancer), and dystopic intermingling of technology and humanity, are already evident in his first published short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose", in the Summer 1977 issue of Unearth.

He consciously distanced himself as far as possible from the mainstream of science fiction (towards which he felt "an aesthetic revulsion", expressed in "The Gernsback Continuum"), to the extent that his highest goal was to become "a minor cult figure, a sort of lesser Ballard.

"[13] While Larry McCaffery has commented that these early short stories displayed flashes of Gibson's ability, science fiction critic Darko Suvin has identified them as "undoubtedly [cyberpunk's] best works", constituting the "furthest horizon" of the genre.

"[35] He re-wrote the first two-thirds of the book twelve times, feared losing the reader's attention and was convinced that he would be "permanently shamed" following its publication; yet what resulted was a major imaginative leap forward for a first-time novelist.

[41] He next intended to write an unrelated postmodern space opera, titled The Log of the Mustang Sally, but reneged on the contract with Arbor House after a falling out over the dustjacket art of their hardcover of Count Zero.

[52] Leonard's review called Idoru a "return to form" for Gibson,[53] while critic Steven Poole asserted that All Tomorrow's Parties marked his development from "science-fiction hotshot to wry sociologist of the near future.

[66] About 100 pages into writing Pattern Recognition, Gibson felt impelled to re-write the main character's backstory, which had been suddenly rendered implausible by the September 11, 2001, attacks; he described this as "the strangest experience I've ever had with a piece of fiction".

[18] Examination of cultural changes in post-September 11 America, including a resurgent tribalism and the "infantilization of society",[70][71] became a prominent theme of Gibson's work,[72] while his focus nevertheless remained "at the intersection of paranoia and technology".

"[83] Three of the stories that later appeared in Burning Chrome were written in collaboration with other authors: "The Belonging Kind" (1981) with John Shirley, "Red Star, Winter Orbit" (1983) with Sterling,[64] and "Dogfight" (1985) with Michael Swanwick.

[94] Despite being occupied with writing a novel, Gibson was reluctant to abandon the "wonderfully odd project" which involved "ritualistic gang-warfare in some sort of sideways-future Leningrad" and sent Jack Womack to Russia in his stead.

Rather than producing a motion picture, a prospect that ended with Tsoi's death in a car crash, Womack's experiences in Russia ultimately culminated in his novel Let's Put the Future Behind Us and informed much of the Russian content of Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

In October 1989, Gibson wrote text for such a collaboration with acclaimed sculptor and future Johnny Mnemonic director Robert Longo[40] titled Dream Jumbo: Working the Absolutes, which was displayed in Royce Hall, University of California Los Angeles.

[89] It was at Art Futura '92 that Gibson met Charlie Athanas, who would later act as dramaturg and "cyberprops" designer on Steve Pickering and Charley Sherman's adaptation of "Burning Chrome" for the Chicago stage.

The story inspired a contribution to the exhibition by architects Ming Fung and Craig Hodgetts that envisioned a San Francisco in which the rich live in high-tech, solar-powered towers, above the decrepit city and its crumbling bridge.

[89] The New York Times hailed the exhibition as "one of the most ambitious, and admirable, efforts to address the realm of architecture and cities that any museum in the country has mounted in the last decade", despite calling Ming and Hodgetts's reaction to Gibson's contribution "a powerful, but sad and not a little cynical, work".

"[109] Contrary to numerous colorful reports, the diskettes were never actually "hacked"; instead the poem was manually transcribed from a surreptitious videotape of a public showing in Manhattan in December 1992, and released on the MindVox bulletin board the next day; this is the text that circulated widely on the Internet.

They collaborated with Matthew Kirschenbaum at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Digital Forensics Lab, and Quinn DuPont, a PhD student of cryptography from the University of Toronto, in calling for the aid of cryptographers to figure out how the program works by creating "Cracking the Agrippa Code: The Challenge",[112] which enlisted participants to solve the intentional scrambling of the poem in exchange for prizes.

[114][115] He commenced writing a blog in January 2003, providing voyeuristic insights into his reaction to Pattern Recognition, but abated in September of the same year owing to concerns that it might negatively affect his creative process.

[52] Neuromancer gained unprecedented critical and popular attention outside science fiction,[16] as an "evocation of life in the late 1980s",[122] although The Observer noted that "it took The New York Times 10 years" to mention the novel.

[8] Gibson's work has received international attention[9] from an audience that was not limited to science fiction aficionados as, in the words of Laura Miller, "readers found startlingly prophetic reflections of contemporary life in [its] fantastic and often outright paranoid scenarios.

[36] In the words of filmmaker Marianne Trench, Gibson's visions "struck sparks in the real world" and "determined the way people thought and talked" to an extent unprecedented in science fiction literature.

"[135] Gibson's work has influenced several popular musicians: references to his fiction appear in the music of Stuart Hamm,[d] Billy Idol,[e] Warren Zevon,[f] Deltron 3030, Straylight Run (whose name is derived from a sequence in Neuromancer)[139] and Sonic Youth.

"[13] In 1995, he identified the advent, evolution and growth of the Internet as "one of the most fascinating and unprecedented human achievements of the century", a new kind of civilization that is – in terms of significance – on a par with the birth of cities,[88] and in 2000 predicted it would lead to the death of the nation state.

[162] Not all responses to Gibson's visions have been positive, however; virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce, though acknowledging their heavy influence on him and that "no other writer had so eloquently and emotionally affected the direction of the hacker community,"[163] dismissed them as "adolescent fantasies of violence and disembodiment.