1948: William Gibson is born in Conway, South Carolina. He later blossoms into legend with the prize-winning fiction that gives the world the term cyberspace.

The death of his father and a move to rural Wytheville, Virginia, propelled Gibson at age 6 to withdraw into his books, especially science fiction. In the 2000 documentary No Maps for These Territories, he called this his “native literary culture.”

The speculative, experimental novels of William S. Burroughs in particular changed Gibson’s perception of what sci-fi could achieve. Through dissatisfaction with his remote environs, he was a...