the same year". Neuromancer gained unprecedented critical and popular attention outside science fiction, as an "evocation of life in the late 1980s", although The Observer noted that "it took the New York Times 10 years" to mention the novel. Gibson's work has received international attention from an audience that was not limited to science fiction aficionados as, in the words of Laura Miller, "readers found startlingly prophetic reflections of contemporary life in [its] fantastic and often outright paranoid scenarios." It is often situated by critics within the context of postindustrialism as, according to academic David Brande, a construction of "a mirror of existing large-scale techno-social relations", and as a narrative version of postmodern consumer culture. It is praised by critics for its depictions of late capitalism and its "rewriting of subjectivity, human consciousness and behaviour made newly problematic by technology." Tatiani Rapatzikou, writing in The Literary Encyclopedia, identifies Gibson as "one of North America's most highly acclaimed science fiction writers". Cultural significance In his early short fiction, Gibson is credited by Rapatzikou in The Literary Encyclopedia with effectively "renovating" science fiction, a genre at that time considered widely "insignificant", influencing by means of the postmodern aesthetic of his writing the development of new perspectives in science fiction studies. In the words of filmmaker Marianne Trench, Gibson's visions "struck sparks in the real world" and "determined the way people thought and talked" to an extent unprecedented in science fiction literature. The publication of Neuromancer (1984) hit a cultural nerve, causing Larry McCaffery to credit Gibson with virtually launching the cyberpunk movement, as "the one major writer who is original and gifted to make the whole movement seem original and gifted." Aside from their central importance to cyberpunk and steampunk fiction, Gibson's fictional works have been hailed by space historian Dwayne A. Day as some of the best examples of space-based science fiction (or "solar sci-fi"), and "probably the only ones that rise above mere escapism to be truly thought-provoking". Gibson's early novels were, according to The Observer, "seized upon by the emerging slacker and hacker generation as a kind of road map". Through his novels, such terms as cyberspace, netsurfing, ICE, jacking in, and neural implants entered popular usage, as did concepts such as net consciousness, virtual interaction and "the matrix". In "Burning Chrome" (1982), he coined the term cyberspace, referring to the "mass consensual hallucination" of computer networks. Through its