The Sprawl

The Sprawl is William Gibson's interconnected fictional setting spanning his landmark cyberpunk trilogy and several short stories from the 1980s. The name refers to the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, a vast urban corridor stretching along the eastern seaboard of a near-future United States, though the stories range across the globe and even into orbital space. The universe is defined by its vision of a hyper-connected, corporate-dominated world where hackers jack into cyberspace - a shared digital hallucination - while street-level hustlers navigate a gritty, technology-saturated underworld. Megacorporations wield more power than governments, artificial intelligences push against the limits of their constraints, and the line between human and machine blurs through cybernetic modification. Gibson's Sprawl stories are widely credited with defining the cyberpunk genre and introducing concepts - cyberspace, ICE, the matrix - that shaped how an entire generation imagined the digital future.