1948: William Gibson is born in Conway, South Carolina. He later blossoms into legend with the prize-winning fiction that gives the world the term cyberspace.

The death of his father and a move to rural Wytheville, Virginia, propelled Gibson at age 6 to withdraw into his books, especially science fiction. In the 2000 documentary No Maps for These Territories, he called this his “native literary culture.”

The speculative, experimental novels of William S. Burroughs in particular changed Gibson’s perception of what sci-fi could achieve. Through dissatisfaction with his remote environs, he was already attempting to create artificial ones more suitable to his hungry mind and heavy heart.

After the sudden death of his mother, Gibson dropped out of his boarding school in Arizona at 18 and set off in search of solace in a 1960s awash in counterculture. Haunting California and Europe, he eventually landed in Canada to avoid a Vietnam draft call that never came — probably because he admitted at his draft hearing that he was interested in taking every drug on Earth.

With the expired ’60s behind him, Gibson married, fathered a child and, in 1977, earned a B.A. in English from the University of British Columbia. There, he widened his literary spectrum beyond sci-fi, turned on to postmodernity, and wrote his first short story, “Fragments of Hologram Rose,” which would later appear in his seminal 1982 short-story collection Burning Chrome.

The stories of Burning Chrome — particularly the title narrative, first published in Omni — married the noir and experimental aesthetics of Raymond Chandler and William S. Burroughs, among many others. He also mixed in a hefty dose of stylistic swagger inherent to the exploding punk and post-punk scenes of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

The stories prompted like-minded authors like Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker and more to form a loose coalition known as the cyberpunk movement. That coalition would go on to renovate not just sci-fi, but speculative literature, science and even journalism, birthing such publications as Wired magazine and others.

Most important, the story “Burning Chrome” marked the first appearance of the term cyberspace — which Gibson would later describe in No Maps for These Territories as an “evocative and essentially meaningless” buzzword that could serve as a cipher for all of his cybernetic musings.

It did that and more, going supernova in his foundational, award-winning debut novel of 1984, Neuromancer. Gibson’s networked artificial environment anticipated the globally internetworked technoculture (and its surveillance) in which we now find ourselves.

The term has gone on to revolutionize popular culture and popular science, heralding the power and ubiquity of the information age we now regard as common as smartphones. Since its invention, “cyberspace” has come to represent everything from computers and information technology to the internet and “consensual hallucinations” as different as The Matrix, Total Information Awareness and reality TV.

From his pioneering Sprawl trilogy to his later Bridge trilogy and beyond into film, television, art and music, Gibson has been variously described as a prophet and a profiteer. He’s even ventured into politics: He and Sterling addressed the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Convocation on Technology and Education in 1993.

In the 21st century that he immeasurably shaped, Gibson remains the planet’s most influential postmodernist revolutionary. The best part? He irrevocably changed culture and technology, indeed the world, without knowing anything about computers. He wrote Neuromancer on a 1927 Hermes portable typewriter.

Lost, lonely bookworms, take heed: You too can change the world, one meaningless buzzword at a time.

Source: Various

Photo: Louie Psihoyos/Corbis

This article first appeared on Wired.com March 17, 2009.