, co-author with Gibson of the short story "
Red Star, Winter Orbit" (1983) and the 1990 steampunk novel
The Difference Engine Literary collaborations Three of the stories that later appeared in
Burning Chrome were written in collaboration with other authors: "
The Belonging Kind" (1981) with
John Shirley, "
Red Star, Winter Orbit" (1983) with Sterling, and "
Dogfight" (1985) with
Michael Swanwick. Gibson had previously written the foreword to Shirley's 1980 novel
City Come A-walkin and the pair's collaboration continued when Gibson wrote the introduction to Shirley's short story collection
Heatseeker (1989). Shirley convinced Gibson to write a story for the television series
Max Headroom for which Shirley had written several scripts, but the network canceled the series. and "appalled everyone" by proposing that all schools be put online, with education taking place over the Internet. and wrote lyrics to the track "Dog Star Girl" for Deborah Harry's
Debravation.
Film adaptations, screenplays, and appearances Gibson was first solicited to work as a screenwriter after a film producer discovered a waterlogged copy of
Neuromancer on a beach at a
Thai resort. His early efforts to write film scripts failed to manifest themselves as finished product; "Burning Chrome" (which was to be directed by
Kathryn Bigelow) and "Neuro-Hotel" were two attempts by the author at film adaptations that were never made. In the late 1980s he wrote an early version of
Alien 3 (which he later characterized as "
Tarkovskian"), few elements of which survived in the final version. Gibson's early involvement with the film industry extended far beyond the confines of the Hollywood blockbuster system. At one point, he collaborated on a script with Kazakh director
Rashid Nugmanov after an American producer had expressed an interest in a Soviet-American collaboration to star Soviet rock musician
Viktor Tsoi. Despite being occupied with writing a novel, Gibson was reluctant to abandon the "wonderfully odd project" which involved "ritualistic gang-warfare in some sort of sideways-future
Leningrad" and sent
Jack Womack to Russia in his stead. Rather than producing a motion picture, a prospect that ended with Tsoi's death in a car crash, Womack's experiences in Russia ultimately culminated in his novel ''
Let's Put the Future Behind Us'' and informed much of the Russian content of Gibson's
Pattern Recognition. s. Adaptations of Gibson's fiction have frequently been optioned and proposed, to limited success. Two of the author's short stories, both set in the
Sprawl trilogy universe, have been loosely adapted as films:
Johnny Mnemonic (1995) with screenplay by Gibson and starring Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren and
Takeshi Kitano, and
New Rose Hotel (1998), starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, and Asia Argento. The former was the first time in history that a book was launched simultaneously as a film and a
CD-ROM interactive video game. ,
Vincenzo Natali still hoped to bring
Neuromancer to the screen, after some years in
development hell.
Count Zero was at one point being developed as
The Zen Differential with director
Michael Mann attached, and the third novel in the Sprawl trilogy,
Mona Lisa Overdrive, has also been optioned and bought. and
Pattern Recognition was in the process of development by director
Peter Weir, although according to Gibson the latter is no longer attached to the project. Announced at
International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2015 is an adaptation of Gibson's short story
Dogfight by
BAFTA award-winning writer and director
Simon Pummell. Written by Gibson and
Michael Swanwick and first published in
Omni in July 1985, the film is being developed by British producer
Janine Marmot at Hot Property Films. Television is another arena in which Gibson has collaborated; with friend
Tom Maddox, he co-wrote
The X-Files episodes "
Kill Switch" and "
First Person Shooter", broadcast in 1998 and 2000. In 1998 he contributed the introduction to the spin-off publication
Art of the X-Files. Gibson made a cameo appearance in the television miniseries
Wild Palms at the behest of creator
Bruce Wagner. Director
Oliver Stone had borrowed heavily from Gibson's novels to make the series, and in the aftermath of its cancellation Gibson contributed an article, "Where The Holograms Go", to the
Wild Palms Reader. Appearances in fiction aside, Gibson was the focus of a biographical documentary by Mark Neale in 2000 called
No Maps for These Territories. The film follows Gibson over the course of a drive across North America discussing various aspects of his life, literary career and cultural interpretations. It features interviews with Jack Womack and Bruce Sterling, as well as recitations from
Neuromancer by
Bono and
The Edge.
Exhibitions, poetry, and performance art ists such as theatre group
La Fura dels Baus, here performing at the
Singapore Arts Festival in May 2007. Gibson has contributed text to be integrated into a number of
performance art pieces. In October 1989, Gibson wrote text for such a collaboration with acclaimed sculptor and future
Johnny Mnemonic director
Robert Longo titled
Dream Jumbo: Working the Absolutes, which was displayed in Royce Hall, University of California Los Angeles. Three years later, Gibson contributed original text to "Memory Palace", a performance show featuring the theater group
La Fura dels Baus at Art Futura '92, Barcelona, which featured images by
Karl Sims,
Rebecca Allen,
Mark Pellington with music by
Peter Gabriel and others. In 1990, Gibson contributed to "Visionary San Francisco", an exhibition at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shown from June 14 to August 26. He wrote a short story, "
Skinner's Room", set in a decaying San Francisco in which the
San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge was closed and taken over by the homeless – a setting Gibson then detailed in the
Bridge trilogy. The story inspired a contribution to the exhibition by architects Ming Fung and Craig Hodgetts that envisioned a San Francisco in which the rich live in high-tech, solar-powered towers, above the decrepit city and its crumbling bridge.
The New York Times hailed the exhibition as "one of the most ambitious, and admirable, efforts to address the realm of architecture and cities that any museum in the country has mounted in the last decade", despite calling Ming and Hodgetts's reaction to Gibson's contribution "a powerful, but sad and not a little cynical, work". A slightly different version of the short story was featured a year later in
Omni.
Cryptography A particularly well-received work by Gibson was
Agrippa (a book of the dead) (1992), a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem that was his contribution to a collaborative project with artist
Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. Gibson's text focused on the ethereal nature of memories (the title refers to a photo album) and was originally published on a 3.5"
floppy disk embedded in the back of an
artist's book containing etchings by Ashbaugh (intended to fade from view once the book was opened and exposed to light — they never did, however). Gibson commented that Ashbaugh's design "eventually included a supposedly self-devouring floppy-disk intended to display the text only once, then eat itself." Contrary to numerous colorful reports, the diskettes were never actually "
hacked"; instead the poem was manually transcribed from a surreptitious videotape of a public showing in Manhattan in December 1992, and released on the
MindVox bulletin board the next day; this is the text that circulated widely on the Internet. Since its debut in 1992, the mystery of
Agrippa remained hidden for 20 years. Although many had tried to hack the code and decrypt the program, the uncompiled source code was lost long ago.
Alan Liu and his team at "The Agrippa Files" created an extensive website with tools and resources to crack the Agrippa Code. They collaborated with Matthew Kirschenbaum at the
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Digital Forensics Lab, and Quinn DuPont, a PhD student of cryptography from the University of Toronto, in calling for the aid of cryptographers to figure out how the program works by creating "Cracking the Agrippa Code: The Challenge", which enlisted participants to solve the intentional scrambling of the poem in exchange for prizes. The code was successfully cracked by Robert Xiao in late July 2012. He commenced writing a blog in January 2003, providing voyeuristic insights into his reaction to
Pattern Recognition, but abated in September of the same year owing to concerns that it might negatively affect his creative process. ,
postindustrial society and the portents of the
information age. Gibson recommenced blogging in October 2004, and during the process of writing
Spook Country – and to a lesser extent
Zero History – frequently posted short nonsequential excerpts from the novel to the blog. The blog was largely discontinued by July 2009, after the writer had undertaken prolific microblogging on Twitter under the
nom de plume "GreatDismal". In 2012, Gibson released a collection of his non-fiction works entitled
Distrust That Particular Flavor. == Influence and recognition ==