is so tedious and wrong” have had little effect. As the distance from that first novel has grown, the myth has only expanded: in 2012, PBS’s Idea Channel declared that Gibson “had a better batting average than Nostradamus” and had “predicted the Internet.” (In fact, the Internet predated “Neuromancer” by years, and never much resembled that novel’s vision of a “consensual hallucination … lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind.”) Gibson’s own repeated admonitions that “science fiction is never about the future” and that “this whole idea of the predictive capacity of S.F. The myth of the prophet William Gibson was born in the early nineteen-eighties, with the wild success of Gibson’s début novel, “Neuromancer,” and the stories collected in “Burning Chrome”: he was heralded as a “cyberpunk noir-prophet,” the “prophet of the information age” who coined the word “cyberspace” while still banging away on a typewriter.
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