yet what resulted was a major imaginative leap forward for a first-time novelist. Neuromancers release was not greeted with fanfare, but it hit a cultural nerve, quickly becoming an underground word-of-mouth hit. It became the first winner of one science fiction "triple crown" —both Nebula and Hugo Awards as the year's best novel and Philip K. Dick Award as the best paperback original— eventually selling more than 6.5 million copies worldwide. Lawrence Person in his "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto" (1998) identified Neuromancer as "the archetypal cyberpunk work". In 2005, as part of the Time list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, Lev Grossman opined of Neuromancer: "There is no way to overstate how radical Gibson’s first and best novel was when it first appeared." Literary critic Larry McCaffery described the concept of the matrix in Neuromancer as a place where "data dance with human consciousness ... human memory is literalized and mechanized ... multi-national information systems mutate and breed into startling new structures whose beauty and complexity are unimaginable, mystical, and above all nonhuman." A 52-year-old Gibson later commented on himself as an author, circa Neuromancer, that "I'd buy him a drink, but I don't know if I'd loan him any money," and referred to the novel as "an adolescent's book". The success of Neuromancer nonetheless led to the 35-year-old Gibson's emergence from obscurity. Sprawl trilogy, The Difference Engine, and Bridge trilogy Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained rooted in Neuromancer, his work continued to evolve conceptually and stylistically. He next intended to write an unrelated postmodern space opera, titled The Log of the Mustang Sally, but reneged on the contract with Arbor House after a falling out over the dustjacket art of their hardcover of Count Zero. Abandoning The Log of the Mustang Sally, Gibson instead wrote Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), which in the words of Larry McCaffery "turned off the lights" on cyberpunk literature. It was a culmination of his previous two novels, set in the same universe with shared characters, thereby completing the Sprawl trilogy. The trilogy solidified Gibson's reputation, with both later novels also earning Nebula and Hugo Award and Locus SF Award nominations. The Sprawl trilogy was followed by the 1990 novel The Difference Engine, an alternative history novel Gibson wrote in collaboration with Bruce Sterling. Set in a technologically advanced Victorian era Britain, the novel was a departure from