Other ideas...

If you like Gibson you'll like this (here is a list of people who you will probably like if you enjoyed William Gibson, or even if you haven't read him there are good ideas here…)

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WilliamGibson

Characters and Style?

The Gibson style is inherited from a different genre than science-fiction: the detective story and the film noir. Gibson does not read like classic sci-fi: his stories are hard-boiled, two-fisted tales of data acquisition. Mean streets, dangerous dames, moral ambiguity, and a new breed of hacker-protagonist. John Blaser, in his web essays on film noir, talks about the anti-hero of 1940s noir: "The makers of this new type of detective film seemed to recognize that if they were going to create a new cinematic view of the world, they also would have to create a completely new hero to exist in that world." Just as creative Hollywood directors of the 40s rebelled against the squeaky-clean movie heroes of the day, so Gibson offered a new alternative to the shiny, spacesuited sci-fi heroes that had preceded him.

However his characters don't always fit these considerations, some commentators have described Gibson's characters as being powerless serfs in a world run by corporations and computers that the reader, at least, is never meant to understand. In fact, Gibson's characters have access to immense power, even if they have to get it by "hacking". This is another advance that Gibson made for science fiction: Gibson's techno toys are things that readers could imagine themselves owning someday. Few people expect to own their own private spaceship anytime soon, but an Ono-Sendai cyberspace deck seems like a natural evolution from today's notebook computer. This is the "punk" in "cyberpunk", the same do-it-yourself ethos that pushed the Sex Pistols and the Clash to prominence while Gibson started writing, or as anti-hero Johnny Rotten said: "Anyone can pick up a guitar and be just like us".