“What are William Gibson’s Best Books?” We looked at all of Gibson’s authored bibliography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!

We took all of the books written by William Gibson and looked at his Goodreads, Amazon, and LibraryThing scores, ranking them against one another to see which books came out on top. The books are ranked in our list below based on which titles have the highest overall score between all 3 review sites in comparison with all of the other books by the same author. The process isn’t super scientific and in reality, most books aren’t “better” than other books as much as they are just different. That being said, we do enjoy seeing where our favorites landed, and if you aren’t familiar with the author at all, the rankings can help you see what books might be best to start with.

The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page. We will update the article if/when a new book by William Gibson is released. Although it probably won’t be immediate so the scores on each site have time to settle and aren’t overly influenced by the early, usually much more opinionated, users.

Happy Scrolling!

The Top Book’s Of William Gibson

20 ) New Rose Hotel

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 18
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 20

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20 ) Red Star, Winter Orbit

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 17
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 21

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19 ) The Difference Engine

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 21
• Amazon: 14
• LibraryThing: 17

1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full and inexorable swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time. And three extraordinary characters race toward a rendezvous with history–and the future.

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18 ) The Belonging Kind

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 15
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 18

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16 ) Spook Country (Blue Ant, #2)

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 19
• Amazon: 13
• LibraryThing: 13

The plot involves journalist Hollis Henry, on assignment for a magazine that doesn’t exist; Tito, whose family came from Cuba, who does delicate jobs involving information transfer; Milgrim, an Ativan addict coerced into domestic espionage; and Bobby Chombo, a troubleshooter for military navigation equipment.

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16 ) Johnny Mnemonic

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 14
• Amazon: 15
• LibraryThing: 16

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15 ) The Winter Market

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 11
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 13

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14 ) The Gernsback Continuum

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 20
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 1

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13 ) Fragments of a Hologram Rose

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 15
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 19

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12 ) Virtual Light (Bridge, #1)

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 10
• Amazon: 10
• LibraryThing: 12

Berry Rydell, an ex-cop, signs on with IntenSecure Armed Response in Los Angeles. He finds himself on a collision course that results in a desperate romance, and a journey into the ecstasy and dread that mirror each other at the heart of the postmodern experience.

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11 ) Distrust That Particular Flavor

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 12
• Amazon: 9
• LibraryThing: 10

Known primarily as a novelist, Gibson has, over thirty years, been approached by different publication to share his insights into contemporary culture. The resulting essays are collected here for the first time.

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10 ) Hinterlands

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 1
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 13

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9 ) Idoru (Bridge #2)

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 12
• Amazon: 6
• LibraryThing: 10

“The best novel William Gibson has ever written about the world we’re entering daily. Neuromancer made Gibson famous; Idoru cements that fame.”—The Washington Post Book World 21st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain. Light everywhere blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea-creature… Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the “signature” an individual creates simply by going about the business of living. But Laney knows how to sift for the dangerous bits. Which makes him useful—to certain people. Chia McKenzie is here on a rescue mission. She’s fourteen. Her idol is the singer Rez, of the band Lo/Rez. When the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club decided that he might be in trouble in Tokyo, they sent Chia to check it out. Rei Toei is the idoru—the beautiful, entirely virtual media star adored by all Japan. Rez has declared that he will marry her. This is the rumor that has brought Chia to Tokyo. True or not, the idoru and the powerful interests surrounding her are enough to put all their lives in danger…

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8 ) Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 9
• Amazon: 10
• LibraryThing: 7

The accolades and acclaim are endless for William Gibson’s coast-to-coast bestseller. Set in the post-9/11 present, Pattern Recognition is the story of one woman’s never-ending search for the now… Cayce Pollard is a new kind of prophet—a world-renowned “coolhunter” who predicts the hottest trends. While in London to evaluate the redesign of a famous corporate logo, she’s offered a different assignment: find the creator of the obscure, enigmatic video clips being uploaded to the internet—footage that is generating massive underground buzz worldwide. Still haunted by the memory of her missing father—a Cold War security guru who disappeared in downtown Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001—Cayce is soon traveling through parallel universes of marketing, globalization, and terror, heading always for the still point where the three converge. From London to Tokyo to Moscow, she follows the implications of a secret as disturbing—and compelling—as the twenty-first century promises to be…

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7 ) Zero History (Blue Ant, #3)

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 5
• Amazon: 12
• LibraryThing: 6

Hollis Henry never intended to work for global marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend again. But now she’s broke, and Bigend has just the thing to get her back in the game… Milgrim can disappear in almost any setting, and his Russian is perfectly idiomatic—so much so that he spoke it with his therapist in the secret Swiss clinic where Bigend paid for him to be cured of his addiction…

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6 ) All Tomorrow’s Parties (Bridge, #3)

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 7
• Amazon: 6
• LibraryThing: 9

Changing circumstances lead four people to travel to San Francisco, each one running from a troubled past and headed for a dangerous future.

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5 ) Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 8
• Amazon: 6
• LibraryThing: 2

Case, a burned out computer whiz, is asked to steal a security code that is locked in the most heavily guarded databank in the solar system.

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4 ) Mona Lisa Overdrive (Sprawl, #3)

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 4
• Amazon: 3
• LibraryThing: 8

Enter Gibson’s unique world–lyric and mechanical, erotic and violent, sobering and exciting–where multinational corporations and high tech outlaws vie for power, traveling into the computer-generated universe known as cyberspace. Into this world comes Mona, a young girl with a murky past and an uncertain future whose life is on a collision course with internationally famous Sense/Net star Angie Mitchell. Since childhood, Angie has been able to tap into cyberspace without a computer. Now, from inside cyberspace, a kidnapping plot is masterminded by a phantom entity who has plans for Mona, Angie, and all humanity, plans that cannot be controlled . . . or even known. And behind the intrigue lurks the shadowy Yazuka, the powerful Japanese underworld, whose leaders ruthlessly manipulate people and events to suit their own purposes . . . or so they think.

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3 ) The Peripheral

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 5
• Amazon: 5
• LibraryThing: 3

The New York Times bestselling author of Neuromancer and Zero History presents a fast-paced sci-fi thriller that takes a terrifying look into the future… Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she’s trying to avoid. Her brother Burton lives on money from the Veterans Administration, for neurological damage suffered in the Marines’ elite Haptic Recon unit. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She made more as a combat scout in an online game, playing for a rich man, but she’s had to let the shooter games go. Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse. Things are pretty good now, for the haves, and there aren’t many have-nots left. Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, fancies himself a romantic misfit, in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby. Burton’s been moonlighting online, secretly working security in some game prototype, a virtual world that looks vaguely like London, but a lot weirder. He’s got Flynne taking over shifts, promised her the game’s not a shooter. Still, the crime she witnesses there is plenty bad. Flynne and Wilf are about to meet one another. Her world will be altered utterly, irrevocably, and Wilf’s, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the past can be badass.

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2 ) Count Zero (Sprawl, #2)

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 3
• Amazon: 3
• LibraryThing: 5

Turner, corporate mercenary, wakes in a reconstructed body, a beautiful woman by his side. Then Hosaka Corporation reactivates him for a mission more dangerous than the one he’s recovering from: Maas-Neotek’s chief of R&D is defecting. Turner is the one assigned to get him out intact, along with the biochip he’s perfected. But this proves to be of supreme interest to certain other parties–some of whom aren’t remotely human. Bobby Newmark is entirely human: a rustbelt data-hustler totally unprepared for what comes his way when the defection triggers war in cyberspace. With voodoo on the Net and a price on his head, Newmark thinks he’s only trying to get out alive. Untilhe meets the angel. A stylish, streetsmart, frighteningly probable parable of the future.

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1 ) Burning Chrome (Sprawl, #0)

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 2
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 4

Tautly-written and suspenseful, Burning Chrome collects 10 of his best short stories with a preface from Bruce Sterling, now available for the first time in trade paperback. These brilliant, high-resolution stories show Gibson’s characters and intensely-realized worlds at his absolute best, from the chip-enhanced couriers of “Johnny Mnemonic” to the street-tech melancholy of “Burning Chrome.”

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William Gibson’s Best Books

William Gibson Review Website Bibliography Rankings