By Therese Poletti
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - William Gibson, the father of the cyberpunk literary genre who envisioned a worldwide computer network long before the Internet was a household word, does not consider himself a visionary.
The legendary sci-fi author, who coined the term ''cyberspace'' and created the genre of the dark, urban sci-fi story where information pirates ``jack in'' to virtual networks, says he does not make predictions as true futurists do.
``It's not a predictive function,'' Gibson, 51, told Reuters in an interview while in San Francisco recently to plug his new novel, ``All Tomorrow's Parties'' (G.P. Putnam's Sons), the last in a trilogy with ``Idoru'' (1996) and ``Virtual Light'' (1993).
He compares himself to a main character in ``All Tomorrow's Parties,'' Colin Laney, who has a gift of reading endless reams of data and sensing emerging patterns, or nodal points. In the new novel, Laney, a character from ``Idoru,'' is now living in a Tokyo subway station in a cardboard box, his ``eyes lit by a backwash of data,'' sometime early in the 21st century.
He knows some kind of change is coming, an info-pocalyptic shift that everyone had predicted with the new millennium. ''Laney is a metaphor for what I do, I point you in the right direction,'' the lanky, 6-foot-4-inch Gibson said with a slight Southern drawl.
He spent his early years in South Carolina and southwestern Virginia. His family moved around a lot and, before he was born, his father worked for a large construction company that provided plumbing for the U.S. government's Oak Ridge Project in Tennessee, where scientists worked on top-secret projects such as the atomic bomb.
'Early Version Of The X-Files'
``He was subject to these sort of Kafkaesque security measures that were in effect there and there was a mythology in my family about the secrecy with which Oak Ridge had been constructed,'' Gibson said. ``It probably was some kind of influence, like a very early version of the X-Files. I had a sense that there were strange things in the world.''
While growing up, he developed an early interest in science fiction and, by the time he was 15, he had read all the sci-fi he could get his hands on -- Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Alfred Bester and others -- and hoped to become a successful science fiction writer himself one day.
As a teenager he also discovered the rebellious Beat writers of the 1950s in a paperback anthology, which he hid from his mother and read in secret. The Beat masters, such as William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, would also become a big influence on him, especially Burroughs, who he said was sometimes so ''unimaginably alien.''
After discovering the Beats, Gibson said, his personal taste shifted toward the bohemian. At 19 he moved to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War draft and, after a late start at a college education, he eventually got what he said was a ``completely useless'' degree in English literature from the University of British Columbia.
He knew he was not cut out to be a teacher, so at the age of 27 he tried writing his first fiction with some short stories. ''I thought, 'I'll try this or forever hold my peace,' but it worked and I've been doing it ever since,'' he said.
``Neuromancer,'' his groundbreaking debut novel, was published as a paperback in 1984, spawning the cyberpunk genre. He won the trio of sci-fi awards -- the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick -- for ``Neuromancer,'' the story of Case, a keyboard cowboy who sells the secrets he finds while hacking in cyberspace but who double-crosses the wrong people.
``Count Zero'' (1986) and ``Mona Lisa Overdrive'' (1988) followed and Gibson established himself as the father of the cyberpunks. But in his latest book the future does not seem as far away, in part because of the now-widespread use of the Internet, the Web and cell phones around the world. The story also takes place sometime around 2005 -- only five years away.
'Scintillating Culmination'
``'All Tomorrow's Parties' is the scintillating culmination, after 'Virtual Light' and 'Idoru,' of his second trilogy and it completes his development from science fiction hotshot to wry sociologist of the near future,'' The Guardian of London wrote.
The story returns to the San Francisco setting he created in ``Virtual Light'' where the Bay Bridge, closed after serious earthquake damage from the ``little big one,'' has become an autonomous zoned community where squatters live in plywood hovels and run businesses with names like ``Dirty is God,'' a Mexican restaurant, and ``Bad Sector,'' a computer store.
In the near future as Gibson writes it characters have dark glasses that double as cellular phones with built-in global positioning systems and AM/FM radio, coffee in a can that gets hot when activated, convenience stores made with a ``smart'' material that eats graffiti, money in the form of credit chips, and nanofax technology, which turns bits into atoms.
``I was working so close to the present it's almost an alternate present,'' Gibson said.
Even if he does not see himself as a visionary, many of his fans do, and at a reading of ``All Tomorrows Parties'' in downtown San Francisco the audience -- mostly male computer geeks -- peppers him with questions about the future of the Internet and the Year 2000 (Y2K) computer problem.
In ``All Tomorrow's Parties,'' Laney refers back to the millennium as nothing more than ``a Christian holiday.'' But Gibson said ``I don't normally make predictions.''
``I think on Jan. 1, 2000, there will be a lot of pissed-off survivalists,'' he added, to great laughter, referring to people who are stockpiling food, water, power generators and other supplies in fear of worldwide chaos at midnight on Dec. 31.