William Gibson

Gibson grew up in rural Virginia and moved to Canada as a young man partly to avoid the Vietnam-era draft, eventually studying English literature at the University of British Columbia while beginning to write short fiction.

The novelist who gave the movement its bible (Neuromancer, 1984) and its vocabulary, he coined the word 'cyberspace' on a typewriter, having barely used a computer. Johnny Mnemonic, adapted from his own short story, made him the rare cyberpunk author to script his own film.

Neuromancer swept the science fiction genre's three major awards — the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Award — in a single year, an unprecedented sweep that cemented cyberpunk as a serious literary movement almost overnight, and he has continued writing influential speculative fiction for decades since.