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Understanding William Gibson (Hardcover)
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Understanding William Gibson (Hardcover)
Series: Understanding Contemporary American Literature
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Gerald Alva Miller Jr.'s Understanding William Gibson is a
thoughtful examination of the life and work of William Gibson,
author of eleven novels and twenty short stories. Gibson is the
recipient of many notable awards for science fiction writing
including the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards. Gibson's
iconic novel, Neuromancer, popularized the concept of cyberspace.
With his early stories and his first trilogy of novels,Gibson
became the father figure for a new genre of science fiction called
""cyberpunk"" that brought a gritty realism to its cerebral plots
involving hackers and artificial intelligences. This study situates
Gibson as a major figure in both science fiction history and
contemporary American fiction, and it traces how his aesthetic
affected both areas of literature. Miller follows a brief
biographical sketch and a survey of the works that influenced him
with an examination that divides Gibson's body of work into early
stories, his three major novel trilogies, and his standalone works.
Miller does not confine his study to major works but instead also
delves into Gibson's obscure stories, published and unpublished
screenplays, major essays, and collaborations with other authors.
Miller's exploration starts by connecting Gibson to the major
countercultural movements that influenced him (the Beat Generation,
the hippies, and the punk rock movement) while also placing him
within the history of science fiction and examining how his early
works reacted against contemporaneous trends in the genre. These
early works also exhibit the development of his unique aesthetic
that would influence science fiction and literature more generally.
Next a lengthy chapter explicates his groundbreaking Sprawl
Trilogy, which began with Neuromancer. Miller then traces Gibson's
aesthetic transformations across his two subsequent novel trilogies
that increasingly eschew distant futures either to focus on our
contemporary historical moment as a kind of science fiction itself
or to imagine technological singularities that might lie just
around the corner. These chapters detail how Gibson's aesthetic has
morphed along with social, cultural, and technological changes in
the real world. The study also looks at such standalone works as
his collaborative steampunk novel, his attempts at screenwriting,
his major essays, and even his experimental hypertext poetry. The
study concludes with a discussion of Gibson's lasting influence and
a brief examination of his most recent novel, The Peripheral, which
signals yet another radical change in Gibson's aesthetic.
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