We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition

His thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors design academia cyberculture and technology. During this period he worked at various jobs including a three-year stint as teaching assistant on a film history course at his alma mater. " Literary critic Larry McCaffery described the concept of the matrix in Neuromancer as a place where "data dance with human consciousness.

After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the dystopic Sprawl trilogy Gibson became an important author of another science fiction sub-genre—steampunk—with the 1990 alternate history novel The Difference Engine written with Bruce Sterling. His most recent novels—Pattern Recognition (2003) Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010)—are set in a contemporary world and have put his work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding school in Arizona Gibson evaded the draft during the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada in 1968 where he became immersed in the counterculture.