William Gibson

Science fiction author William Gibson has emerged as a prolific user of the Twitter social network platform, publishing some 2,149 updates since he first started using the service in early April this year.

“My poor old blog’s just sitting here while I write this book” the author wrote on his Google Blogger blog in late July. However, he added, directing fans to his Twitter page, @GreatDismal, “I really do find micro-blogging congenial (not to mention collegial) and most of what I was doing here, before, was exactly that.”

Gibson is best-known for his 1980′s Sprawl trilogy, consisting of the Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive books, in which he is credited with coining the term “cyberspace” and helping to birth the cyberpunk genre. However he has continued to publish other science fiction works over the years, and is currently working on a new book, entitled Zero History.

When Gibson first started using Twitter, he wrote in a blog post on 1 May, he had “not much of idea” what the platform was. “Still have no idea what it is, or where it’s going, but will hang on to GreatDismal for simplicity’s sake,” he wrote.

Since that time, however, the author has posted an average of almost 12 tweets per day, more than most other authors who use the service, although others such as fantasy author Brandon Sanderson and sci-fi author Kevin J. Anderson also use Twitter quite a lot.

Gibson has attracted 14,194 followers to his account, but is only following 68 people on Twitter, although he uses the service to interact directly with people (@ replying) rather than just posting updates. His tweets cover everything from the recent dust storms in Australia to pop culture and re-tweeting links posted by others.

Commentary
It makes a strange kind of sense that Gibson, who pioneered much of the vernacular and ideas that drove the birth of the cyberpunk genre, should be participating in early stage technologies such as Twitter, which are really changing the way people interact.

And there is no doubt that Gibson is highly aware of the way that modern day technology is bringing to reality many of the ideas he was only dreaming about twenty years and more ago.

For example, I remember that the internet — even then not a totally understood phenomenon by many people — featured heavily in Gibson’s 2003 book Pattern Recognition, and that similarly iPods were used as a plot device in 2007′s Spook Country.

Given the way that people are using Twitter for ever-developing new purposes, I would guess that Gibson is not only using Twitter to create a dialogue with fans, but also may be planning to feature the social networking platform in his new book Zero History or maybe other works. However I can’t find much at all online about the book so far, so probably Gibson is keeping most of it to himself in his usual cryptic way :)