Burning Chrome
Burning Chrome collects Gibson's early short fiction from the late 70's and early 80's. Contents: Preface / by Bruce Sterling -- Johnny Mnemonic -- The Gernsback continuum -- Fragments of a hologram rose -- The belonging kind / by John Shirley and William Gibson -- Hinterlands -- Red star, winter orbit / by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson -- New Rose Hotel -- The winter market -- Dogfight / by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson -- Burning chrome.
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25recommend
72mentions
62people
2008–2026years
42% recommend57% neutral1% critical
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What Hacker News says
- Gibson is one of those writers who are much better prose stylists than plotters.
I enjoy reading his prose immensely, but he's been stamping out books with the same template for ever: an expert is hired to do something. Turns out there's a man with unlimited cash flow funding everything, but was hiding his true intentions (usually in order to lay a trap), which are revealed, and then some McGuffin is saved or eliminated or whatever; meanwhile, the main character mostly didn't do anything, just a passive spectator to some plot unfolding around them. The one I will forgive most easily here is Count Zero, which I think is much better than its reputation (except for the Haitian voodoo deity stuff, which didn't land for me); while the template is the same, the ruse connects well with Neuromancer, and it's just a fun, action-filled book that is definitely not boring. (The ruse in The Peripheral, by comparison, was deeply unsatisfying. Agency was junk, most of the book describing preparations for a military attack while the main character sleeps. Even the prose was much worse and much sloppier than usual.)
What's interesting is that his early short stories are much more original, I think. Burning Chrome, New Rose Hotel, and Johnny Mnemonic, for example, show flashes of originality that maybe Gibson wasn't able to keep up when plotting out whole novels.
- I have find memories of this anthology! got into cyberpunk via gibson's "burning chrome" and sterling's "a good old-fashioned future", and I still think short stories were the best of the genre. I remember them a lot more vividly than I do the novels.
- An interesting aspect of Neuromancer again was how obviously perfunctory and mechanical the plot appears when you're not as absorbed by the mystery of what will happen next. It's easy to see that Case is almost entirely a passive observer, only stepping in with his hacker skills for a brief mission in cyberspace, then not doing anything except follow the gang as they travel to a new location to pick up another McGuffin that the mysterious man with unlimited financial resources needs. It's creaky, but works despite its McGuffin-chasing adventure caper aspect because it's so well written and Case becomes a proxy for the reader, allowing us to observe the plot from a relative outsider's POV, and enjoy all the fantastic sci-fi world building.
But then if you read more Gibson, you will come to realize every single Gibson plot is like that. It's always a mysterious man (always a man!) with apparently unlimited resources who needs to hire someone, usually a ragtag group of specialists, to obtain a McGuffin, usually under false pretenses. Sometimes the group is on the run, but the protagonists invariably end up passive observers in an Easter egg hunt (with the possible exception of Turner in Count Zero) and are generally being manipulated into doing what they do. I think the most egregious example of this is The Peripheral, where the heroine does absolutely nothing; it's a classic witness protection plot where the main character is just a pawn, moved around for safety or as bait, while observing as things happen to her. The sequel, Agency, has an ironic title given that the heroine does even less and appears to have no agency at all.
Once you realize the basic skeleton of a Gibson plot, you come to appreciate how well the world building hides it, but it's clear he ran out of ideas quickly after his first book. The two Neuromancer sequels had a bunch of action but were once again about McGuffins and behind-the-scenes manipulation. The Bridge novels is another McGuffin hunt with lower stakes. The Blue Ant books even more so. With The Peripheral he seemed to be trying at something completely new, but ended up stuck in the same mold, parallel universes being used to uncover the identity of someone pulling McGuffins from behind the scenes once again. A not-terrible but old-fashioned sci-fi idea well executed, but little more than a potboiler. Agency was awful.
Maybe I'm being cynical, but I've come to the conclusion that Neuromancer was Gibson's one good idea, and while his execution — world building and prose and so on — has been top notch throughout, every book has been weaker than the last. I had to look up his post-Bridge books on Wikipedia to even remember what they were really about. There are occasional glimmers (the Burning Chrome collection is fantastic), and none of his books are not enjoyable on some level. But when I look at the wonderful works of contemporaneous authors like Iain Banks, Gibson doesn't measure up. Banks is an apt comparison, I think, because like Gibson his books are also immensely plot-driven and McGuffin-based, and often lean on similar themes, but with very different results.
I do love Gibson's dense, beautiful prose, and will read anything he writes just for the pleasure of it, so there's still that.
- I wasn't too impressed by neuromancer even back in its day because I had read gibson's brilliant short story collection "burning chrome" first, and felt neuromancer didn't quite measure up to it. I feel like a lot of the stories in "burning chrome" would still hold up well today, for that matter.
- It might be worth reading the short stories in 'Burning Chrome'.
Also, there is an excellent BBC audio drama made from the book. It's on Youtube.
- named after the virtual dolphin from the movie Johnny Mnemonic
The dolphin was named Jones not Flipper. And Jones was also a part of the short story that predated the film adaptation by several years. Check out "Burning Chrome," William Gibson's collection of short stories, for this and others. Well worth the read.
