Pulp! Influences: William Gibson

“The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

This is one of my favourite opening sentences and comes from, possibly, my favourite sci-fi novel, William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

With its release in 1984 Gibson near single-handedly created the cyber-punk genre and many writers and filmmakers have cribbed from it since. (It’s actually quite surprising the Wachowskis never got into any trouble over The Matrix[1999] because its unacknowledged debt to Neuromancer is...