William Gibson
See first quotes from William Gibson
31 Quotations from William Gibson
| AI n. | 1984 Neuromancer (1989) .v. 73 Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. |
| cold sleep n. | 1984 Neuromancer (1986) 192 The reason Straylight’s not exactly hoppin' with Tessier-Ashpools is that they're mostly in cold sleep. There’s a law firm in London keeps track of their powers of attorney. Has to know who’s awake and exactly when. |
| construct n. | 1999 All Tomorrow’s Parties xiii. 55 How could any human, even one so thoroughly mediated, marry a construct, a congeries of software, a dream? |
| cyberspace n. | 1982 Burning Chrome in Omni July 72/2 I knew every chip in Bobby’s simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the ‘Cyberspace Seven’, but I’d rebuilt it so many times that you’d have had a hard time finding a square millimetre of factory circuitry in all that silicon. |
| cyberspace n. | 1984 Neuromancer (1989) .iii.51 Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. |
| cyberspace n. | 1984 Neuromancer (1989) .i.4 A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. |
| food pill n. | 1981 Gernsback Continuum in T. Carr Universe 11 89 ‘John…we’ve forgotten to take our food pills.’ She clicked two bright wafers from a thing on her belt and passed one to him. |
| free fall n. | 1983 Red Star, Winter Orbit in B. Sterling Mirrorshades (1986) 204 She kissed his cheek, wobbling in freefall. |
| free fall n. | 1984 Neuromancer (1989) .viii. 103 Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case negotiate a freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus. |
| gafia n. 2 | 1985 Letter in Flash Point (#7) Oct. 7 [T]he sacred waters of Not Writing Count Zero Any More flow over me like the grace of the living God. This is to mere gafia as Peruvian flake is to lookalike diet pills. |
| gravitic adj. | 1986 The Winter Market in Interzone (#15) Spring 10/1, I grinned, thinking about that, and suddenly it hit me that it really was over, that I was done with Lise, and that now she'd be sucked off to Hollywood as inexorably as if she'd poked her toe into a black hole, drawn down by the unthinkable gravitic tug of Big Money. |
| groundside adv. | 1983 Red Star, Winter Orbit in Burning Chrome (1986) 113 .Think what their testimony will be doing to us groundside. |
| hive mind n. | 1984 Neuromancer (1989) xxiii. 269 Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. |
| jack in v. | 1984 Neuromancer (2004) ii. 36 Your nervous system would fall out on the floor if you jacked in now. |
| jack in v. | 1984 Neuromancer (2004) iv. 65 Its rainbow pixel maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He'd go straight to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in…. He jacked in and worked for nine straight hours. |
| light sail n. | 1982 Hinterlands in W. Gibson Burning Chrome (1986) 78 Tsiolkovsky 1 is fixed at the libration point between Earth’s gravity and the moon’s, but we need a lightsail to hold us here, twenty tons of aluminum spun into a hexagon, ten kilometres from side to side. That sail towed us out from Earth orbit, and now it’s our anchor. |
| mag- prefix | 1993 Virtual Light 135 He showed Rydell how to put the debit-card into a machine that gave him a five-hundred dollar Container City magstrip. |
| matrix n. | 1984 Neuromancer (1989) ii. iii. 51 The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games…in early graphics programs and military experimentation in cranial jacks. |
| meat puppet n. | 1984 Neuromancer 147 Where’s the meat puppet? |
| morph n. | 1996 Idoru 216 That isn’t me. It’s a morph. If I could prove it was a morph, I could sue you. |
| nanobot n. | 1999 All Tomorrow's Parties vii. 32 Nobody knew exactly what it was that had spilled… The government was using nanobots to clean it up through. |
| nanotech n. | 1993 Virtual Light 19 She'd just laughed and said German nanotech could take care of all of that. |
| nanotech adj. | 1999 All Tomorrow's Parties liv. 224 Even in Tokyo, seventeen-point-eight of your markedly technofetishistic populace refuses to this day to set foot in a nanotech structure. |
| pocket universe n. | 1996 Idoru xxiii. 163 It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convulsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. |
| postcyberpunk adj. | 1999 All Tomorrow's Parties Thanks 278 The post-cyberpunk contingent in Mexico City…who encouraged me, with their warm enthusiasm. |
| saucer people n. | 1981 Gernsback Continuum in Universe 11 (1983) 107 Quit yelling and listen to me. I’m letting you in on a trade secret: really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts. If it keeps the saucer people off my back, it can keep these Art Deco futuroids off yours. Try it. What have you got to lose? |
| scientifiction n. | 1986 Burning Chrome Pref. 10 It’s a devastating refutation of ‘scientifiction’ in its guise as narrow technolatry. |
| vac-suit n. | 1984 Neuromancer (1989) x. 129 I want you to get over to the pro shop and get yourself fitted for a vac suit. |
| viewport n. | 1983 Red Star, Winter Orbit in B. Sterling Mirrorshades (1986) 210 The viewports…were always the first to go. |
| viewport n. | 1984 Neuromancer (1989) .xiv. 173 The bright marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the first Tessier up the well. |
| waldo n. | 1986 Burning Chrome 201 I was working late in the loft one night, shaving down a chip, my arm off and the little waldo jacked straight into the stump. |