1948
William Gibson
American-Canadian novelist, the writer most associated with the invention of cyberpunk as a literary register. The Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer 1984, Count Zero 1986, Mona Lisa Overdrive 1988) established the conceptual furniture of cyberpunk — the megacorporation with extraterritorial sovereignty, the deniable contractor, the globalised informational underclass — that Snow Crash, Shadowrun, and Cyberpunk 2077 would later pick up and formalise.
Stake§
Gibson writes from a stance closer to noir realism than to libertarian optimism: the megacorporate world of the Sprawl is not aspirational but oppressive, with the protagonists generally working at the margins of the systems they inhabit. The political register is darker than Stephenson's, and the political consequence of the work has been less about giving readers a vocabulary to celebrate than giving them one to recognise and dread.
For the chartered-violence corpus Gibson is the writer who made the megacorporation as sovereign actor a legible category in popular fiction. The Tessier-Ashpool clan-corporation in Neuromancer is functionally a charter-recognised quasi-state; the Yakuza, Maas Biolabs, and the various zaibatsu of the trilogy operate as competing sovereigns with their own militaries, intelligence services, and territorial domains.
The Gibson register is more atmospheric than analytic and the books reward reading for the texture rather than for systematic worldbuilding; for the institutional logic of marketised sovereignty, Snow Crash is crisper. But Gibson is the original.