Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
William Gibson became a famous science fiction writer after publishing Neuromancer. As a result, Brandywine productions asked him to write a screenplay for the third Alien movie. Gibson's treatment focused on Bishop and Hicks, and the aliens become an airborne virus. Needless to say, the studio went in another direction. But hey, you can read Gibson's script online.
Neuromancer is a novel that has its characters taking a lot of drugs, and it describes those trips in a vivid and, dare we say, artistic manner. So, what was Gibson's drug of choice while writing Neuromancer? O'Keefe's Extra Old Stock Lager. Yep, just plain ol' beer. (Source.)
Many people read Neuromancer as heralding the age of the computer. However, Gibson wrote all of Neuromancer and half of its sequel, Count Zero, on a manual typewriter. He didn't buy a computer until the typewriter broke and that was well after Neuromancer was already published. (Source.)
In the film Hackers, the computer being hacked into is called the Gibson in honor of William Gibson. (Source.)