Gibson wrote the Sprawl trilogy, which established the imagery, the vocabulary and much of the attitude of cyberpunk. His characters are contractors and criminals working at the edges of corporate power, and technology reaches them second hand, already worn and repurposed.
His prose owes more to hardboiled crime fiction and to Beat writing than to earlier science fiction, and he has been open about writing the early work with little technical knowledge of computing. That distance is precisely what produced a metaphorical rather than engineering vision of networks, one that proved more durable than technically accurate predictions.
Recurring subjects: technology as street culture, corporations that have replaced states, and bodies modified as a matter of employment. The prose is dense, elliptical and heavy with brand names, describing effects rather than explaining mechanisms. Plots are structured like heists, with assembled teams, specialist skills and a job that goes wrong in an instructive way.
He supplied the founding vocabulary of a genre, and terms he coined are now used routinely by people who have never read him. His influence extends across film, games and design far beyond literature, to the point that the aesthetic often circulates detached from the books.
For readers who want prose style as much as plot, and who enjoy being dropped into a world without explanation. Essential for anyone interested in where cyberpunk began, and in how much of its vocabulary was invented in a single book.
