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“... adviser wrote. The best he could do was to reach for a fictional comparison: ‘weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand “diviner” who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger’. ‘That girl’ is Cayce Pollard, the 32-year-old protagonist of Pattern Recognition (2003). She isn’t the narrator, quite (the ...”

“... that good.’ It’s an effortful business, and, it seems, a full-time job, but hardly unusual in William Gibson’s futuristic fiction, which often features characters whose sensitivity to ambient data borders on the supernaturally acute. His last but one, Idoru (1996), introduced Colin Laney, an ‘intuitive fisher of patterns of information . . . the ...”

“... the form of an ‘uchronic’ novel: set in ‘no time’, instead of Utopia’s ‘no place’. Gibson and Sterling propose that the Duke of Wellington is killed by a Luddite bomb in 1831. Tired of internecine struggle between Tories and workers, the country turns to the ‘Industrial Radical Party’ for a sweeping transformation of British ...”

“... The future isn’t what it used to be. In one of William Gibson’s first published stories, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, a photographer is assigned to capture examples of ‘futuristic’ American design from the Thirties, the kind of dream architecture that graced the covers of pulp science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories ...”

“... In the novels of William Gibson and other writers of cyberpunk, the new SF sub-genre, in the glittery non-realism of the movies, cyberspace is crystalline and neonlit and shiny, a place of infinite depth and detail, of towers and canyons and technicolor hypergeometry, the ‘consensual hallucination shared daily by billions ...”

“... a camera or a phone or a tape recorder when it’s held up in front of you. Glass is different. William Gibson tried on a pair briefly at a conference, and tweeted: ‘Expect Google Glass to be reworked into less obvious, more trad spectacles, sunglasses etc, for covert use.’ A racing certainty, I would have thought. (And a disaster for those of us ...”

“... Banks may have as much trouble getting out from under the success of his first novel as did William Golding. It was a memorable debut. The Wasp Factory provoked a moral panic in 1984. The TLS critic called it the ‘literary equivalent of the nastiest kind of juvenile delinquency’; Margaret Forster thought it less a novel than the script for a video ...”

“... a modem and the right phone numbers can dial up, read or write. They inhabit what the SF writer William Gibson calls ‘cyberspace’, the linked electronic interiors of the world’s computers. Cyberspace is real, even though it has no overt physical presence. The American telephone system lives in cyberspace. Its ‘switches’ are enormously complex ...”

“... hacker through a dense and endless forest of computer networks – what the Science Fiction writer William Gibson has called cyberspace – Stoll discovers that, whoever he is, the hacker is using the Berkeley lab as a way-station to infiltrate sensitive military and intelligence computers all over the United States. It takes the better part of a year to ...”

“... answer the Wellsian position in vaguely Wellsian terms’, but this does not ring true. William Golding perhaps did that in Lord of the Flies (cp. Moreau), in The Inheritors (cp. ‘The Grisly Folk’), in ‘Envoy Extraordinary’ (cp. Wells’s Outline of History): but Lewis would deny every one of Wells’s fundamental propositions. What one ...”

“... cans of Diet Coke.The LRB has received a sheet of puffs for The Chief, David Nasaw’s Life of William Randolph Hearst (Gibson Square, £9.99), including one from Conrad Black in the Scotsman. That would be the same Conrad Black who wrote the book’s foreword. A helpful yellow post-it note reads: ‘FYI Conrad Black in ...”

“... in deliriously over-elaborate explanations) than to the dirty cyberpunk realism of Sterling and William Gibson. Similarly, Murakami’s fantasy narrative is more reminiscent of the elegant allegories of Ursula le Guin than the sword and sorcery adventures of, say, Anne McCaffrey. In the parallel story, the city’s burly Gatekeeper tells the newcomer ...”

“... lost to the forces of history by way of ‘the numbing raptures of the Web’. In a novel​ by William Gibson, say, the cursoriness with which Zero K handles this counter-plot, the main plot and the halting narrative in general would stand out as a fault. So would Jeff’s apparent cluelessness about personal ‘devices’ (‘There is a smartphone ...”

“... in the OED, and so offers the hope that I might have made it up – though, alas, I discover that William Gibson, father of cyberpunk, used it to describe an addiction to technology. Ah well, my usage is etymologically purer because it preserves the sense of the Greek root -laliá, meaning ‘chatter’. Shakespeare was a playwright, a word forged with ...”

“... as if hi-tech limbs had been grafted onto the torso of early modern statecraft: Wolf Hall meets William Gibson. Komiaga begins his day by repressing a nobleman, and then spends the rest of it attending to a variety of tasks: censoring a play, investigating a subversive poem, resolving a customs dispute with the Chinese in Siberia, visiting a ...”