Burning Chrome (original 1986; edition 2003)

A mixed bag, as early-short-story collections often are, and it took me a while to get through the first few - I kept picking up other things to read in the meantime. However, it's worth reading for "Hinterlands" alone, which was totally fascinating and creepy and left me dying to know more. "The Winter Market" was a close second. ( )

I liked the writing in most of the stories, although some of them seemed to lack focus. It is interesting to note that Gibson is credited with bringing science fiction out of the doldrums in the 80's and making it more respectable in the literary arena. Oooookkkaaaayy. I guess I understand that. These stories are definitely more literary, darker and more opaque than say a vintage Asimov, so I guess because of that they lend themselves more readily to a technical literary criticism. ( )

Burning Chrome is a collection of ten short stories by William Gibson. Of those, I would rank five (Johnny Mnemonic, The Gernsback Continuum, Hinterlands, New Rose Hotel and Burning Chrome) as "very good" or higher.

From me, that's high praise. I don't know why, but I just usually don't enjoy short story collections very much. A while ago I stopped reading them in one hit, because that's not how short stories are supposed to be read, and instead started reading a short story or two in between novels - but it didn't make much difference. I just don't think I enjoy short fiction as much as long fiction, and I'm not alone. I'm not going to try to find a link to back that up; it's conventional wisdom in the publishing industry that short stories don't sell, and every Google hit for that phrase brings up an article trying fruitlessly to debunk it or arguing the self-evident point that commercial value doesn't equal literary value.

Anyway, the point is that I usually shrug my shoulders when reviewing short story collections, but I liked Burning Chrome a lot. I think Gibson's style suits itself to short fiction (and essays) as much as it does to long fiction. (Normally I'd say "better than," but Gibson is one of the most important writers of the last 30 years and his long fiction is amazing as well). He's a writer for whom style is as important as substance, a man who holds a mirror up to our culture, his fiction littered with the brand names and place names of an increasingly capitalist and globalist society. He's like a Stephen King in reverse, predicting the zeitgeist of the future instead of capturing the zeitgeist of the past (and both writers have less mainstream recognition than they should, because they dared to write genre fiction). Burning Chrome is full of stories about flawed people living on the margins of society, alienated in enormous cities, forging connections with other losers, dystopic technology integrated into their grey and painful lives.

Aside from a few melancholy clunkers (Fragments of a Hologram Rose, Dogfight) Burning Chrome sets a remarkably high standard, and proves why William Gibson is one of history's greatest science fiction writers. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2012/03/review-of-burning-chrome-by-william.htm... ( )

We're an information economy. They teach you that at school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified . . .

The other stories in this book were science fiction, but "The Belonging Kind" would probably be best described as horror (even though nothing too scary actually happened). My favourites were "The Gernsback Continuum" and "The Winter Market", and I probably liked the title story least since the ice-breaker run through the matrix to burn Chrome seemed a bit samey after reading a couple of his novels recently. ( )