Let's give Gibson his due (Score 1)

I'll grant that Gibson didn't know much about computers or networks when he wrote Neuromancer. I'll also grant that other novels have been far more prophetic and accurate.

But let's give Gibson his due. His "Sprawl" fiction (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome) had more "surface area" than any of those other novels. He sold oodles of those books, and they entered the collective consciousness like a mainline heroin shot. He folded in MTV sensibilities that ensured his books would break the "geek" stigma which plagued SF to that point.

Gibson's prose, and his understanding of human nature, are unrivaled in the annals of SF. To read Neuromancer is to become one of his hapless characters, strugging to stay afloat in a Tofflerian Future Shock of sensory and technological overload.

The other great thing about Gibson's novels is what I call the "Lure of the TechnoGoddess": that is, he portrayed a technology (cyberspace) so sexy that hordes of computer-science geeks were compelled to labor to bring it about -- despite Gibson's relative naivete concerning all things computational. And this despite the fact Gibson saw his own work as both humorous and dystopian.