William Gibson’s foray into television included an X-Files episode that aired in 1998, called “Kill Switch,” and it’s one of my favorites. In it, Mulder and Scully must pursue a killer computer that lives in an RV and drives around killing people through the Internet. I know how it sounds. But compared with aliens and monsters, and alongside cartoonish cyberspace euphorias like Hackers and The Net, “Kill Switch,” with its arrogant computer geniuses, dispirited hackers, A.I. and brain-uploading, still feels right at home in 2012.This was only a tiny sliver of Gibson’s work, but it said a lot about his influence: the science-fiction-writer-for-people-who-do-not-read-science-fiction has left his mark in a dozen books, a handful of films (including a forthcoming, long-time-coming rendition of Neuromancer), and across the cultural map. That’s because he imagined what an increasingly giant part of that map looks like; “cyberspace,” the term he coined in 1983, is now considered by the Pentagon to be the fifth domain of warfare, and the imagery in his books added a kind of faded screen glow to an era’s paranoia about the digital future. Other things he may have given us, according to his Wikipedia page, include virtual sex, “the explosive growth of virtual environments in video games,” digital cities, fake Internet personalities, reality television, and the term “matrix.” All this at a time in the ‘90s when Gibson, eager for a distraction-less writing environment at home in Vancouver, didn’t own a computer.Watch the rest over at Motherboard.
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