Burning Chrome

None of he stories in this collection are bad and a handful are really good but for the most part I found them to be just competent. There is a sameness to the stories that is disconcerting considering the page-turning quality of his novels. Worth a read if you like Gibson.

I enjoyed this book, but it was hard to cut each story. I will definitely go for the other books in this series; I love Gibson's writing style.

Ten stories, three of which are set in Gibson's Sprawl world of Neuromancer. They vary in content and there are some winners.

We have to think back to the time before the cyber world became a reality for these stories. The stories paint a future where corporations have overtaken government and personal autonomy, but these are increasingly our own reality. Apple and Amazon churn out cheap products at the expense of those who make them and we are mostly OK with that because it benefits us. The 2024 American election resulted in Elon Musk becoming a non-elected 'assistant president' and he wants to control everything.

Putting these issues aside, the stories have some deeply human moments. Gibson writes emotions into his stories in a way that makes the reader retain empathy for the characters once the book is closed.

It's been a while since I've read short SF stories. Decades ago I read a bunch of short story collections from the 70s - they were filled with idealistic futurism or abstract visions so fantastic as to be removed from anything relatable. Fun, but ultimately pure escapism concerned more with the science than the fiction.

What Gibson creates here, behind all the chrome and neon, are stories rooted in humanity, not tech. Characters with desires, drives, flaws, and pain. The stories in Burning Chrome, for all the superficially slick brightness of their settings, are dark, lonely, tech-noir tales of hubris, love, lust, betrayal, and failure. That's not to say they're wholly bleak. There is a feeling that self actualisation is the ultimate goal of his characters, and indeed that they believe it to be within their reach, which I think is why I'm left with a feeling of hope from the worlds presented here, if not from the stories themselves.

And, yes, the highest of tech is present too. Minds merging with the net, holographic firewalls, augmented reality, trading hot data for cold hard cash and dodging vastly powerful corporations who'll stop at nothing to get it back. Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” within these pages and even though the tech is presented in a quaintly physical way - with cartridges, disks, tapes, and wires - it somehow doesn't feel outdated. You're experiencing a hallucination of an alternate future that we've already sidestepped, but it doesn't matter because it's the concept and characters that matter here. It's not how a personality is transferred into cyberspace that matters, it's the questions that raises, and where it leaves the people who loved them. That kind of philosophy of personal identity is timeless. It's because Gibson's so grounded in the human experience and implications that he gets away with slamming data cartridges into your protagonist's arms without it feeling cheesy.

Every one of the 10 stories here is excellent. I tried to pick my favourites and ended up with a shortlist of 8. I could write paragraphs in praise of each one. If you really push me, I'd say my favourites were New Rose Hotel, The Winter Market, and Burning Chrome but man it was tough to pick just 3. How could I leave off Johnny Mnemonic or The Belonging Kind?

When I was a kid I would spend ages on dialup downloading hacker text files to read offline. One of them recommended Neuromancer and Snow Crash and while I didn't take the advice at the time something stuck and the names bounced around in my head for about 20 years. Finally taking the advice and discovering these authors after all that time, it's rekindled a sense of wonder and love for the web in me. A technological frontier with a feeling that it makes anything possible. That it's an important thing for humanity. Somehow the web had become mundane to me. Reading Gibson is changing that, making me realise that, perhaps, there's still time for it to change the world again.

I won't rate this one as it was rather uneven. First and last stories were really good (Johny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome), but some of the others were quite uninteresting. Really cool tho to see some of the first stories in a genre and realize how innovative in some ways they were.

Questo è stato un fantastico primo approccio alla letteratura cyberpunk. I racconti, specie quelli iniziali, sono densi di dettagli di un mondo spinto all'estremo ma ancora squisitamente anni 80, con luci al neon, delfini cyborg e sequenze alla Tron. Ogni racconto tocca temi e ambientazioni molto diversi (e classici). Si va dalle egemonie politiche delle grandi corporate a silenziose invasioni dei bar, passando per il primo contatto alieno fino al transumanesimo. Da questo punto di vista è una raccolta ricchissima e molto varia a livello tematico, peccato per lo stile dell'autore a volte troppo dispersivo.
Caratteristica pressoché generale della raccolta è l'inquietudine e la malinconia di personaggi persi in una società folle, dove i sentimenti umani si perdono in un mare di ingranaggi e conquiste effimere. Perché il progresso tecnologico, nella raccolta, è vissuto come decadenza e raramente come una vittoria.

Note: This was my first encounter with W Gibson.

This was not the easiest collection of short stories to read, because the author's descriptions of the future are so vivid, manic, and unapologetically hard-core specific you get disoriented at the world he's painting. In his world(s), social divides are magnified and the synthetic get woven into the real, reinforcing rather than mitigating human flaws. The stories buzz with energy, the characters are gritty, emotive, and the science seems just out-there plausible.

Three of the 10 stories are author collaborations. Favourites are New Rose Hotel (corporate espionage in a way I've never read), Red Star, Winter Orbit (Russian astronauts in space), and Burning Chrome (which has the most beautiful descriptions of computer hacking, and viruses).

Will pick up Gibson's Neuromancer soon.

Executive Summary: An anthology of 10 short stories mostly related to or set in Mr. Gibson's Sprawl world. I enjoyed some, but not all of the stories. Only worth picking up if you really like the Sprawl books in my opinion.Audio book: 10 stories. 10 different narrators. None of them stand out one way or another. Nobody was excellent and nobody was terrible. A few did occasional voices or accents, but none of them struck as particularly memorable. Full Review[b:Neuromancer 22328 Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1) William Gibson https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1285017005s/22328.jpg 909457] is one of those books that has stuck with me 20 years later. I had the fortune of reading it before the Matrix movie came out in the early days of the internet when many of his concepts still seemed fresh.With this anthology you can see the building blocks of that book. Megacorporations, cyberspace, keyboard cowboys, black ice. The elements are there.But for the most part these stories just weren't very good in my opinion. My favorite story, Dogfight seems like it could be set in the Sprawl, but could just as easily be set in a completely different sci-fi setting.Some of the stories are “near-future” which when read 30 years later don't feel very futuristic at all any more.The other story I really enjoyed was Johnny Nuemonic. I guess it's a lot different from the movie, but it's been so many years since I've seen it I don't really remember. This again is one of those stories that could be at home in some generic sci-fi future as it could in the sprawl.The only story that is directly related to the sprawl is Burning Chrome, which I found to be OK, but not great. From a literary point of view, this anthology is interesting to read and see how Mr. Gibson was putting together elements of his previous works to come out with [b:Neuromancer 22328 Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1) William Gibson https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1285017005s/22328.jpg 909457], but in my opinion most of these stories can be skipped.3 Stars overall.Story RatingsJohnny Nuemonic - 4The Gernsback Continuum - 2Fragments of a Hologram Rose - 2.5The Belonging Kind - 3Hinterlands - 3.5Red Star, Winter Orbit - 3New Rose Hotel - 2The Winter Market - 2.5Dogfight - 4.5Burning Chrome - 3

Superb.

This is a short story collection by William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk, most famous for his seminal novel Neuromancer. To read Gibson is to realize just how completely every other work in the genre has cribbed from him, right down to the slang he invented.

Not all of Gibson's work is up to the standard of Neuromancer. I'm happy to say that this one is. Burning Chrome collects ten short stories of varying lengths. I would prefer not to describe the stories; I believe a critical part of the experience is going in blind, allowing oneself to construct a mental image of the settings Gibson creates from the context he provides. Extrapolating his world from the little corner he renders is part of the journey. Instead, here's a list of the stories:

1. Johnny Mnemonic2. The Gernsback Continuum3. Fragments of a Hologram Rose4. The Belonging Kind5. Hinterlands6. Red Star, Winter Orbit7. New Rose Hotel
8. The Winter Market9. Dogfight10. Burning Chrome

I enjoyed all ten of them, but the starred stories were my favorites. As is Gibson's style, the stories are grimy and gritty as you'd expect a cyberpunk setting to be.

I love Gibson for his ideas and his settings, but several passages made me wish for a Kindle edition just so I could highlight. A lot of good turns of phrase in here.

This book is currently available only in physical format, and is not currently being printed, but copies are plentiful at the moment and are not hard to get hold of. My paperback edition features a preface by Bruce Sterling in defense of science fiction as a genre, which I enjoyed very much as well. I am sorry to say that the genre does seem to need sticking up for.

Very much worth reading.

Una raccolta di racconti cyberpunk dal maetro del genere, una storia più bella dell'altra, atmosfere alla “blade runner, malinconiche, tecnologiche, un futuro raccontato in maniera superba...
In questa raccolta il genio di Gibson è espresso al suo massimo, e la percezione delle ambientazioni è trasmessa in maniera impeccabile...
quando il futuro è solo pioggia e microchip...