Elizabeth Mills jumps in front of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) sign at National Harbor, Md., February 23, 2018. (Photo by Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

A woman wearing a face mask to help curb the spread of the coronavirus stretches her body next to a masked woman sitting on a bench outside a shopping mall in Beijing, Thursday, October 21, 2021. (Photo by Andy Wong/AP Photo)

Yuri Gagarin does not always show up in full-scale astronautics. In this picture he smiles during his summer vacation in Sochi, Russia in 1961 with sunglasses and sunhat in the camera. (Photo by Imago/Eastnews)

A winter swimming enthusiast dives into a partly frozen lake in a partly frozen lake in Shenyang, in northeastern China's Liaoning province on January 25, 2022. (Photo by AFP Photo/China Stringer Network)

Team Kazakhstan throw Zhaklin Yakimova of Kazakhstan into the air while they perform their routine in the Mixed Team Acrobatic during the World Aquatics Artistic Swimming World Cup 2024 - Stop 2 at Aquatics Centre on May 05, 2024 in Paris, France. (Photo by Adam Pretty/Getty Images)

Read Ziegler of the United States competes in the bike segment of the 2024 Intermountain Health IRONMAN 70.3 North American Championship on May 04, 2024 in St George, Utah. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images for IRONMAN/AFP Photo)

William Gibson is not one of the authors that spits out novels like a machine – in his long and fruitful career he has only published 11 novels andof short stories and articles in the tens each. Still his impact on modern literature was huge – the “noir prophet” of the cyberpunk subgenre (that he was one of the pioneers of) has predicted the rise of reality television, virtual reality, video games and the internet. He is a Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction writer, with a special eye for what the future might bring.

Elephants munch on Christmas trees in their enclosure at Berlin's Zoologischer Garten Zoo on January 4, 2013 in Berlin, Germany. Traditionally, the animals get in the first week of the year leftover Christmas trees. (Photo by Andreas Rentz)