The girl in the black vinyl minidress, shit-kicker boots and neon hair braids told me she was a cyberpunk. “Wow,” I answered, shouting over the club’s thumping techno-trance beat, “I love William Gibson.” I may as well have namechecked Samuel Taylor Coleridge at a Metallica gig. She stared at me for a while, then shouted back “I’m not into the Bee Gees.”

Pop culture rarely recognises its influences, especially when they are literary. But it’s a testament to just how closely attuned William’s Gibson’s work was to the zeitgeist, that in 1992 cyberpunk was manifesting in the cultural interface where 80s goth met 90s techno.

Gibson was a decade into his writing career by the time I came face to face with a cyberpunk on the dancefloor. Neuromancer, which celebrated the 30th anniversary of its publication this year, was one of those books I read over and over again, tearing through his Sprawl trilogy and the handful of short stories he had published in Omni magazine through the early 80s.

Hungry for more, I picked up the Mirrorshades anthology edited by Bruce Sterling. Despite strong stories such as Solstice by James Patrick Kelly and Petra by Greg Bear, the truth was that none of the other writers who became associated with cyberpunk were doing what Gibson was doing.

The science fiction and fantasy novels I’d read before Neuromancer all offered shades of escapism. Going back to the SF genre after reading Gibson, I realised with disappointment that, with few exceptions, escapism was all it offered. Gibson expressed his own discontent with the the genre of SF in his 2011 interview with the Paris Review, describing his early novels as a “dissident influence” against the genre.

I wasn’t reading William Gibson to escape reality, I was reading him because his writing was the best description I could find of the reality I was growing up in. It wasn’t predicting the future that made Neuromancer important. It was charting, through the metaphors of sci-fi, the psychological reality of a society being profoundly disrupted by technology that made Gibson’s writing exceptional.

Gibson’s idea of cyberspace, and the virtual reality technology used to access it, weren’t a literal prediction of the future, but as metaphors they did accurately capture our disembodied relationship to technologies such as smartphones and tablet computers. Our bodies are staring, blank-eyed in to glowing lights behind panes of glass, while our minds are navigating intense, complex, immersive digital realities.

By the 90s this screen culture was still limited to the television and cinema. But the number of television channels was multiplying, and films were becoming more powerful as CGI made it possible to create ever more believable realities on screen. And it was clear to anyone who knew how to look, and particularly to an artist like Gibson, that these screens could exert powerful control over the minds immersed in them.

Being a teenager in the 90s was like living half your life in a digital mind-control experiment, as advertisers vied to control our spending patterns. Here in 2014, where screens occupy every corner of our world, I’m guessing being a teenager is like living 98% of your life in a digital mind control that is no longer experimental. It was this pervasive cultural coercion that cyberpunk kicked against, whether it was through books like Neuromancer, or kids getting dressed up like goths to go to their local nightclub.

Like every other rebellious subculture from hippies to hip-hop, cyberpunk was quickly reabsorbed in to consumerism. By 1999 the imagery of cyberpunk, much of it originating from Japanese anime such as Akira and Ghost In The Shell, was so familiar that it could be recycled wholesale as a Hollywood blockbuster in The Matrix. In literature, cyberpunk was quickly ground down from a “dissident influence” to a worn-out sub-genre, as hundreds of books co-opted Gibson’s style but entirely missed his message.

Gibson’s art continued along its own path. By Pattern Recognition in 2001 his novels had caught up with the near future they once foreshadowed. Are they still science fiction? Their combination of realism and subtle but significant science fictional ideas makes them perhaps the clearest example of transrealism in mainstream literature. Gibson’s new novel The Peripheral takes the author back to the future.

The cultural moment that cyberpunk described has passed, and the future Gibson wrote towards has now become the past.