James McGirk
William Gibson is a magpie and a seer. His father poured concrete for the foundations of hidden military installations while he hoarded fragments of a future he hoped would scoop him from the sticks and deliver him a life worthy of his probing, greedy brain. Gibson moved to Canada to dodge the draft, became a grad student, then a writer—a cyberpunk, writing hard-boiled, media-savvy stuff that thumbed its nose at fat boring space operas starring silver-suited princelings.
To hurtle through space we had to live on asteroids; to live on asteroids, flesh and bone were rasped from our bodies. Glass blowers found three cavities in the porous galactic stone and blew bubbles to contain us. Topped us off with nutritious fluids, and pushed us out—