As you may know, my thesis is about the author William Gibson. He invented the term ‘cyberspace’ and now wishes that everyone would shut up about that and read his new stuff.

Anyway, if you ever wondered what William Gibson was like before he was famous, here’s some footage of him in 1968. Now, I understand that this won’t be exciting for very many people, but I found it quite amusing to see Gibson in his dropout stoner days and to spot the occasional seeds of what he became ten years later when he started writing short stories:

Sex doesn’t really have any importance attached to it. I think it’s really not differentiated from eating or sleeping or breathing.

Here you’ve got the beginnings of a post-modern attitude to sexual activity, where the whole body and all actions available to it become placed on an equal level.

Do you see God when you take LSD?

Do Gibson’s characters see God when they go into cyberspace?

On the other hand, it’s also pretty similar to a lot of the waffle spoken by other hippies at the time, so perhaps what is stranger is that he managed to turn it all into something that really did shape a new direction for western culture.