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Everyone likes this book but me, it seems. There's nothing wrong with it, exactly, but I liked it more when I read the same ideas by different authors years ago. This treatment of them is nothing special.
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.
Enjoyed the read, prose could be better. Strangely, a whole bunch of typographical errors; not sure if they are exclusive to the Kindle version I read or not. Good worldbuilding, not crazy about the ending.
This was a book club pick. I quite enjoyed it. It's set in the '50s, and the premise, as the Goodreads blurb notes, involves desecration of dead bodies in a small Southern town, but most of it is about a protagonist's desperate flight to report it to someone who will listen before he's caught and killed. Not too much more I can say plotwise without venturing into spoiler territory.
Since I didn't care for the last book club pick, I was pretty stoked to have enjoyed this one. The writing is strong; the first sentence is pretty flowery, and while I enjoyed it, I was initially worried it would make the novel too hard to read, but Gay doesn't spend the entire novel dropping descriptors on you by the shovelful and it's perfectly readable.
