> I see so many people loving Gibson and crediting him for inventing the genre whole cloth, but of course he didn't! He probably came as close as an author cou

> I see so many people loving Gibson and crediting him for inventing the genre whole cloth, but of course he didn't! He probably came as close as an author could to inventing the genre whole cloth. No one's claiming that Gibson had zero influence from previous SciFi. But the authors you mention didn't write anything that could be perceived as being cyberpunk without generalizing things to the point where they're meaningless ("Russ wrote about cyborgs, and Gibson did too!" - yes, they were an ongoing staple in SciFi for years). The vast majority of what people think of when they think of cyberpunk comes from Gibson, as far as I can tell. I've tried in vain to find anything close to it pre-Gibson (again, without generalizing things to the point where we're not really talking about cyberpunk anymore). I'd say he's more responsible for cyberpunk as a genre than Tolkein is for generic fantasy.