Nearly four decades ago, William Gibson published a short story called Burning Chrome in Omni magazine, and with it, he birthed cyberpunk. (It also coined the term “cyberspace” in its third sentence.) The story prefigured Neuromancer, Gibson’s first novel and most enduring achievement. Burning Chrome taught its readers how to think about the “colorless nonspace” between our screens. In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman — the ideas editor of the magazine’s website — spends a lot of time with the author for a profile, and he elegantly lays out the roots of his fiction in a long, textured piece.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Rothman finds that, for Gibson, writing plausible futures begins with a deep engagement with the…