Burning Chrome by William Gibson Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Burning Chrome
Book Review: Why did I wait this long?
Summary: 5 Stars
I've had this book sitting on my bookshelf for over 10 years. Now I have to wonder why I waited so long to read it! I guess maybe I had Gibson locked into my images of cyberspace, Shadowrun, the Matrix, and so on. The short stories in this book showed me that he has much more range that that.
I can see where his writing style could be off-putting to some. Tech terms abound, and you don't come away from most of the stories feeling good about life. On the plus side, when I let myself get into the story, Gibson's words took me into his world like few authors ever have. Definately an excellent read, and I'm glad I started with this book.
Book Review: all wonderful but not all cyberpunk
Summary: 4 Stars
While William Gibson IS a gifted writer with his original insights into post-modern technological cultural, these short stories don't all revolve around this theme. Only Johnny Mnemonic, New Rose Hotel, Winter Market and Burning Chrome. These stories are the of the same caliber as Neuromancer and Count Zero (the other two Gibson novels I've read). The other stories were not throwaways, but they were goodies thrown into the bag- all good, some exceptional, prosed with short yet deep stories. This is a definite addition to a Gibson collection, but would I go as far as saying that this is a definite addition to a cyberpunk collection... perhaps.Book Review: worth it for "Hinterlands" alone
Summary: 5 Stars
Take this and the collection Mirrorshades (edited by Bruce Sterling and you will have the definitive "cyberpunk" short story collection.
Burning Chrome is a solid representation of Gibson's early work ("the Sprawl period") and while its most often represented with references to Neuromancer, his finest, most poignant prose is in this collection of short stories.
Perhaps most utterly fascinating is the late-stage Cold War mentality that we had ourselves a nuclear armageddon just around the corner but that after we got there, we would discover it just wasn't nearly as bad as we'd hoped. A few feeble bomb exchanges are overshadowed by black ops infiltration both physical and digital. Our wars are over in days rather than years and then we all go back to normal with re-drawn borders that mean anything only to cartographers anyway.
Even in the shorts where a near-term memory of war is noticeably absent (e.g., "The Gernsback Continuum"), the emphasis still seems to lie on epoch-altering events that are so feeble in their moment but so far-reaching in their wake.
All that said: "Hinterlands" is the most gut-wrenchingly emotional story in science fiction; if nothing else, it alone makes this collection a must-have.