American writer Tom Maddox is best known as the author of science fiction, as well as the founder of the literary terms "cyberpunk" and "electronic countermeasures", which later found widespread use among science fiction writers around the world.
Biography and career
Tom Maddox (full name Daniel Thomas Maddox) was born in October 1945 in the United States of America.
His closest friend and partner was William Gibson, an American science fiction writer who had moved to Canada since 1967 and has dual citizenship.
Together with Gibson, Tom Maddox wrote two episodes of the American sci-fi television series The X-Files: the first one titled "Kill Switch", the second one called "First Person Shooter".
Tom Maddox is known as a contributor to the literary genre of science fiction "Cyberpunk", which reflects the decline of human development and culture against the backdrop of rapidly advancing technological progress, information technology and cybernetics.
Maddox was also Professor of Literary Studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington State.
Creation
Tom Maddox's first and only novel is the famous "Halo", written in 1991. The novel tells about the possibility of moving from planet Earth to a space habitat, participating on the way in intensive contemplation of the nature of artificial intelligence in a virtual reality environment. Sure, this Maddox novel is a bit hectic and difficult to read, but overall it is full of positive energy.
What is Maddox's contribution to fiction? Mostly Tom Maddox writes stories in sci-fi style: Mind is a Strange Balloon (1985), Snake Eyes (1986), The Robot and the One You Love (1988), Florida (1989), Strange Child (1989), Angel of Gravity (1992), Spirit of the Night (2010).
Author of scientific terms
Tom Maddox is the author of the world famous term Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics or ICE, which literally means "electronic countermeasures" or "countermeasures of electronic intrusion." One of the manuscripts of the never-published history that first used the term was shown by Tom Maddox to his friend William Gibson at a science fiction conference in Portland, Oregon. After what he saw, Gibson asked a friend for permission to use this abbreviation in his works. Tom Maddox agreed, with the result that the term ICE was used in Gibson's early cyberpunk science fiction novels and short stories, and eventually popularized in the Neuromancer novel. In the writings of William Gibson, the term ICE was used to refer to software that prevents hackers from gaining access to protected computer data.
Subsequently, Tom Maddox licensed his work under a Creative Commons license.
Note: Creative Commons licenses allow creators to communicate what rights they reserve and which rights they waive in favor of recipients or other creators. Essentially, Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyrights, but are based on them.
Work on the creation of new episodes of the television series "The X-Files"
Tom Maddox and William Gibson are the authors of two episodes of the American sci-fi television series The X-Files, well known to Russian audiences as The X-Files.
The television series follows the FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who work on cases related to the paranormal, called the X-Files. Within the meaning of the series, Agent Mulder believes in the paranormal and the supernatural, while the skeptical Agent Scully is assigned to debunk this myth.
In "Kill Switch", written by Maddox and Gibson, Agents Mulder and Scully are targeted by villains as they investigate the strange circumstances of the death of a reclusive computer genius rumored to be researching artificial intelligence.
The episode of the movie "Kill Switch" earned a high-view rating as it was watched by over 18 million people in the original broadcast.
Tom Maddox and William Gibson, as true pioneers of cyberpunk, wrote another episode for the X-Files series called "First Person Shooter". In this episode, the writers reflected a high-class academic cyber culture.
Written by Maddox and Gibson, the scripts for two episodes of The X-Files include themes characteristic of the authors: alienation, paranoia, artificial intelligence and the transfer of consciousness into cyberspace.
