Editorial Observer; A Prince of Cyberpunk Fiction Moves Into the Mainstream

The Microsoft Corporation creeps down the telephone line to update my computer software every now and then. What seem like innocuous greetings from Microsoft are often security patches, designed to close gaps in the software through which prying eyes out there in the vast, cold reaches of cyberspace could potentially glimpse my data and my innermost thoughts.

The habit we have of describing the circuits and fiber optics that move data from one place to another as a landscape is owed mainly to William Ford Gibson, a 6-foot-5 beanpole of a writer with round glasses, who coined the word cyberspace and popularized it in his 1984 science fiction novel ''Neuromancer.'' The book has been translated into about 20 languages -- including Hungarian and Estonian -- and is a cult favorite around the world. It was the first of several books in which Mr. Gibson envisioned an information-obsessed, information-saturated future where stealing and protecting data are the main preoccupations and access to information separates the haves from the have-nots.

Mr. Gibson's novels and short stories are worshiped by hackers, argued over by philosophers in arcane journals and rhapsodized about by teenage garage bands. But he has paid a literary price for presaging the vexations of the information future in such vivid terms, while dreaming up the talismanic word cyberspace -- which he clearly regrets, given the way he sometimes bristles when asked about it. The ''father of cyberspace'' tag has kept him confined to the science fiction shelf (in the back of the bookstore), where teenagers tend to gather and which mature readers of fiction tend to avoid.

Influential science fiction writers typically die broke and unknown to the broader reading public -- unless a blockbuster movie brings them somehow front and center. Mr. Gibson's recent few novels -- ''Idoru,'' ''Virtual Light'' and his most successful achievement so far, ''Pattern Recognition'' -- have escaped the sci-fi ghetto and jumped to the front of the bookstore with little if any help from the Hollywood dream machine.

The 20-year-olds who helped to make ''Neuromancer'' the bible of the cyberpunk movement are nearing middle age -- and coming into the prime book-buying demographic. But Mr. Gibson's recent appearance in the bookstore window has mainly to do with the fact that the world we actually live in has finally caught up to the world he depicted in his novels when the information age was not yet even a gleam in Wall Street's eye.

Teenage boys were naturally turned on by Mr. Gibson's gimmickry -- like the computer jacks that hackers plug into their brains to enter cyberspace. But subtract the technology, and you see that the early Gibson books were founded on the idea that the information age would be qualitatively different from the ones that preceded it and that the data-driven society was going to be anything but benign.