To his Kitsilano neighbours, he's a really nice family guy (they tell you this anxiously, to reassure you he's not some kind of crazed cyberpunk weirdo).

To the science fiction fans he used to hang out with at the University of B.C., he's a great cartoonist, someone absolutely worth inviting to a party and the only guy as skinny as Spider Robinson.

Born in 1949, Gibson grew up in South Carolina. Until recently he's been very reticent to discuss childhood, but a biography he posted in November (at www.williamgibsonbooks.com) shares some unexpectedly personal details:

"Gene Wolfe once said that being an only child whose parents are dead is like being the sole survivor of drowned Atlantis. There was a whole civilization there, an entire continent, but it's gone. And you alone remember. That's my story too, my father having died when I was six, my mother when I was 18."

A childhood spent moving frequently from one "red brick Levittown-style" suburb to another, and then a sudden relocation after his father's accidental death to a conservative small town, left Gibson an "introverted, hyper-bookish" adolescent who dreamed of becoming a science fiction writer. His direction shifted abruptly in his teens when his mother sent him to private school, and he discovered Beat writers William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg, and the rest of the counterculture. When his mother died, he dropped out and turned on, and moved north.

"Having ridden out the crest of the 60s in Toronto, aside from a brief, riot-torn spell in the District of Columbia, I met a girl from Vancouver, went off to Europe with her (concentrating on countries with fascist regimes and highly favorable rates of exchange) got married, and moved to British Columbia, where I watched the hot fat of the 60s congeal as I earned a desultory bachelor's degree in English at UBC."

"In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for anything like 'career,' I found myself dusting off my 12-year-old's interest in science fiction."

And science fiction has never been the same. In 1984, Gibson's first novel Neuromancer burst on to the scene, coining the term "cyberspace" and spawning an entire "cyberpunk" sub-genre. He won all the SF awards to be had and then went where few science fiction writers had gone before -- his stylish prose and sharp insights into technology and urban humanity gained him worldwide literary acclaim.

Six more novels and a collection of short stories followed, along with TV and movie screenplays and films made from his story "Johnny Mnemonic" and "New Rose Hotel."

Articulate, poised and always ready with pithy post-modern commentary, Gibson became an international celebrity, even having a 90-minute documentary made about him (No Maps for These Territories, 2001).

Although journalists have described Gibson as "reclusive" (possibly because he doesn't live in New York), he's a familiar figure around Vancouver -- friendly, unpretentious and well known for his quiet kindness to friends. Although he recently started writing a blog (a personal journal posted to the internet), Gibson has always been very protective of his family's privacy and stays away from media glare when at home.

I met with the multi-faceted writer -- freshly jet-lagged from a publicity tour in Copenhagen but always eloquent -- at a Vancouver coffeehouse. We talked about his new book, Pattern Recognition, which marks a new departure in Gibson's career -- a novel that is NOT science fiction. Its present-day storyline follows Cayce Pollard, a New York fashion-industry consultant, whose fascination with enigmatic pieces of film footage discovered on the internet draws her into globe-spanning intrigue.