Hot air balloons in flight over Melbourne, Australia on January 24, 2022. (Photo by Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Back in England, one of the British soldiers that continue to return in their thousands from Northern France, belies any mood of defeat with some high spirited piping on a train. (Photo by Parker/Fox Photos/Getty Images). 1st June 1940

Brazil's forward Debinha (up) vies with Jamaica's goalkeeper Sydney Schneider during the France 2019 Women's World Cup Group C football match between Brazil and Jamaica on June 9, 2019, at the Alpes Stadium in Grenoble, central-eastern France. (Photo by Emmanuel Foudrot/Reuters)

A boy plays on the glass at Thailand's first skywalk in Bangkok, Thailand on November 18, 2018. (Photo by Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters)

Italian rider Eva Lechner competes in the women's elite race of the “Hotondcross” cyclocross, the competition's fourth stage of the DVV Trofee Cyclocross in Ronse, on December 14, 2019. (Photo by David Stockman/BELGA/AFP Photo)

A man reacts as health workers help collect a nasal swab sample to test for COVID-19 in Hyderabad, India, Thursday, September 17, 2020. As India’s coronavirus confirmed cases jump by a record 97,894 cases in the past 24 hours, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government faced a scathing opposition criticism in Parliament for its handling of the pandemic and a contracting economy leaving millions jobless on Thursday. (Photo by Mahesh Kumar A./AP Photo)

In a photo taken on November 4, 2020 visitors wearing traditional Korean hanbok dress walk beneath yellow ginko leaves in a courtyard at Gyeongbokgung palace in Seoul. (Photo by Ed Jones/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.