> William Gibson literally invented the cyber punk genre.

I love William Gibson; I’ve read Neuromancer probably once a year for the past 25 years. The Peripheral is a truly tremendous work.

But Gibson didn’t “literally invent the cyberpunk genre”; Akira and Blade Runner both beat him by two years, and the word was coined by Bruce Bethke in a short story two years before those. Walter Jon Williams’ Hardwired is more responsible for the tropes of the genre (drug use, crime, cybernetic modification, hacking) and Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk TTRPG, largely responsible for cyberpunk in its most popular conception, is almost a direct line-by-line data dump of things that feature in Hardwired, as much as everyone wants to act like it’s the playable version of Neuromancer.

Gibson is a hugely influential author but he’s actually kind of the edge of cyberpunk, rather than its barycenter. (On the other hand, he really is double-handedly responsible for the steampunk genre, having written The Difference Engine with Bruce Sterling.)

The Peripheral is a good, Gibsonian show for real, though.