Voodou isn’t like that. It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done. You follow me? In out system, there are many gods, spirits. Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. There’s a ritual tradition of communal manifestation, understand? Voodou says, there’s a God, sure, Gran Met, but He’s big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can’t get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it’s street religion, came out of dirt poor places a million years ago. Voodou’s like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?

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.