Burning Chrome

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the tech is presented in a quaintly physical way - with cartridges, disks, tapes, and wires - it somehow doesn't feel outdated.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.