The sci-fi novelist on inventing the term cyberspace, the surprising way AI could be truly intelligent and the ending he regrets In the same way Hunter S. Thompson and Pablo Picasso gave us gonzo journalism and Cubism, you’ve been credited with creating cyberpunk and inventing the term cyberspace. How do you plead? I remember early in my career looking at a yellow legal on which I wrote down infospace and dataspace, and they just looked woefully unsexy.