Gibson's work provided, and continues to provide, the media and society with the language with which to describe and understand these changes.
William Ford Gibson was born on 17 March 1948 in Conway, South Carolina, a small town near the coastal resort of Myrtle Beach. He was the son of William Ford Gibson, a prosperous contractor, and Otey (Williams) Gibson. The family traveled frequently, as his father went from one job to another. One of his father's contracts had a significant impact on the young Gibson: installing toilets in the Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility in which the first atomic bomb was made. Gibson grew up with stories about the intense security arrangements, and this exposure was the first intervention of a science-fictional reality into his life. As a child, he was also a consumer of science-fiction television shows and toys. His father died when Gibson was eight years old, and he and his mother moved to Wytheville, a small town in southwestern Virginia on the edge of the Appalachian Mountains, to be with her family. He described himself to Larry McCaffery in Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers (1990) as being a "bookish, geekish, can't-hit-the-baseball kind of kid" during this period.
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