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Read Burning Chrome (2003)

Burning Chrome (2003)

Online Book

Genre
Series
Rating
4.03 of 5 Votes: 2
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ISBN
0060539828 (ISBN13: 9780060539825)
Language
English
Publisher
harper voyager

Burning Chrome (2003) - Plot & Excerpts

Adapted from ISawLightningFall.comIf the novel is a sojourn in a foreign land, short stories are trips to the municipal park. Much of their provinciality is a function of length. Long-form fiction has the space to luxuriate in detail, dwelling on tertiary characters, describing each bit of their surroundings and spawning hydra-headed plots that wriggle every which way. But while the novel remains the champion of the marketplace, it can seem downright clumsy when compared with the elegance of a well-written short. This is doubly true when it comes to the pieces collected in William Gibson’s Burning Chrome.If Gibson’s first novel had a flaw, it was that the overgrowth of its imaginative setting choked out plot and character development. Burning Chrome pares back the speculative material, and the results are cleaner, better-ordered, even when they share the same world. The best-known of the bunch is “Johnny Mnemonic,” a man-on-the-run tale that reads like a genre recombination of techno-thriller, hardboiled and dystopia. (Unfortunately, most of its fame is due to being made into an execrable movie starring Keanu Reeves.) “New Rose Hotel” takes a noir-ish turn, with a mercenary specializing in corporate defections narrating the final moments of his life, sweaty hands clasped around a cheap Chinese .22. The title story comes across as an early iteration of Neuromancer, all the archetypes of data thief and cybernetic heavy and unattainable beauty in play.The remainder veer into different territory. In one, humanity comes in contact with a superior spacefaring species, the grim result being not exactly the stuff of Star Trek (“Hinterlands”). Another has a shy linguistics professor discovering a race of chameleon-like humanoids who can blend in with any social setting (“The Belonging Kind”). “Dogfight” and “The Winter Market” pivot on the idea of hamartia, the “fatal flaw” of classical tragedy. The former features a grifter desperate to win a championship in an underground gambling ring, the latter a wasted woman determined to become an artist in dreams before disease claims her life.Yes, some of the stories have aged poorly (“Red Star, Winter Orbit”) or feel more like ideas than proper narratives (“Fragments of a Hologram Rose”). But those intimidated by the breadth and density of Gibson’s Nebula-, Philip K. Dick- and Hugo-winning work should try his stories. Don’t judge them by their modest lengths. Chrome shines bright.

This was... a very different read than I expected, but I liked it. I already knew that Gibson's a writer who really divides readers, and even though I generally prefer the New Wave/cyberpunk school of science-fiction over the genre's "golden age" (for reasons related to writing style rather than political ideology might I add) there were still several surprises.One thing that struck me very much was how unlike the cyberpunk stereotypes the stories found in "Burning Chrome" actually are. Less than half even qualify as tangential to that sub-genre, with a few being closer to hallucinatory magical realism and "New Rose Hotel" having so few science-fiction elements that it could just as well pass for an offbeat film noir-style crime story. Another interesting thing is how Gibson's writing contains primordial forms of the most annoying tendencies in today's Western high culture (overtly fragmented surrealistic manner of expression, a rather cynical worldview, fascination with the most dysfunctional parts of Japanese culture) but here they're actually used successfully and not at all annoying.This brings me to my main point: I think many people, even some of his fans, misunderstand William Gibson. While he on the surface appears as self-consciously futuristic and technophiliac as the vintage futurists mocked in "The Gernsback Continuum", in ethos he's more a Bill Burroughs/Tom Pynchon-style psychedelic post-modernist mind-bender than a "proper" science-fiction writer. Since that's the angle I read Gibson's work from, I find the so-called flaws many readers find to be my favourite things about his writing style. Likewise, the "nerd-macho" fascination with the power of technology is actually for the most part secondary to other and much more interesting themes.Basically, what I like about the stories collected in "Burning Chrome" is that down to fine details in the prose styles they seem to written by and for people living in the fictional worlds they describe, rather than a real-life audience contemporary to the author. It's like the readers have to "re-program" their own ways of thinking in order to get what's going on. That's a really cool way to approach fantastic/speculative literature when done right, and I think Gibson for the most part succeeds here.

What do You think about Burning Chrome (2003)?

Amazon.com Review Ten brilliant, streetwise, high-resolution stories from the man who coined the word cyberspace. Gibson's vision has become a touchstone in the emerging order of the 21st Century, from the computer-enhanced hustlers of Johnny Mnemonic to the technofetishist blues of Burning Chrome. With their vividly human characters and their remorseless, hot-wired futures, these stories are simultaneously science fiction at its sharpest and instantly recognizable Polaroids of the postmodern condition. From Publishers Weekly In his enthusiastic description of the '30s and '40s "moderne" style of industrial design (featured in one of these stories), Gibson might be writing about his own work: "The change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you'd find the same Victorian mechanism . . . . It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future." That dexterous, shallow artifice has won Gibson awards and fervent fans (especially for his first novel, Neuromancer but beneath it is something old, worn and tired. Thus "Johnny Mnemonic," whose body computer stores secret information, is just a variation of Mr. Memory from The 39 Steps. Gibson's gangsters, corrupt industrialists, young techies and lowlifes eager to belong to any in-group that will have them, are cliches without conviction. This weak collection of 10 short stories seems to have been rushed out to cash in on Gibson's current popularity. Paperback rights to Berkley. Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
—Joseph Harris

In 2005 my husband and I rented Johnny Mnemonic; it was one of the stupidest films we had ever seen. Curious to see if it was a problem with the translation to film or the source material, I decided to get a copy of the book: Burning Chrome, the first story being "Johnny Mnemonic." Having now suffered through the entire collection of stories, I can say that both the filmmakers and the author can share the blame equally.I know that there are many fans of William Gibson's books but he doesn't do much for me. The worst of the stories in Burning Chrome bored me. The others were vaguely derivative of Philip K. Dick and Jack Kerouac but with some new cyber-babble thrown in. The three best stories of the book were ones that Gibson co-wrote: "The Belonging Kind" with John Shirley, "Red Star, White Orbit" with Bruce Sterling, and "Dogfight" Michael Swanwick. These collaborations allowed Gibson to world build (his strong suit) while the plot was left to the collaborator.
—Sarah Sammis

Burning Chrome is a collection of William Gibson’s early short fiction and a good starting point for anyone unfamiliar with his work. These seminal cyberpunk stories were written in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s. And although technology has gathered substance and taken form in the intervening years, they’ve lost none of their power. Of the ten stories included in this collection, “Hinterlands” and “Burning Chrome” are my particular favorites. “Hinterlands” is a lonely, evocative tale about a space station positioned alongside ‘the highway’ – a mysterious phenomenon discovered when a ship, traveling between Earth and Mars, suddenly disappears. The ship’s eventual return from parts unknown inspires other ‘hitchhikers’. But the highway proves fickle: it accepts some and rejects others. Those favored are greeted upon their return by the space station’s first responders, who brace themselves to confront whatever grim reality is to be found within each returning ship.I'm not a technician, but I appreciate Gibson's craft here: his story arc, the way he feeds us digestible bites. There are beautiful passages, such as his rationale for choosing the word 'highway' over any other description of the phenomenon. I consider this story to be a little apart from Gibson’s usual pieces in content and tone.If “Hinterlands” is a little apart, “Burning Chrome” is smack dab at the center, classic Gibson, as befits a title piece, and more representative of the cyberpunk science fiction subgenre. “Burning Chrome” is a crime caper of the first order, the tale of a clever heist perpetrated by two hackers in the Sprawl, Gibson’s signature landscape. It has a cinematic feel that resonates even in the first sentence: “It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.” In “Burning Chrome” Gibson introduces constructs and concepts he will continue to develop in later work, and several of his recurring characters make their first appearance. For example we meet simstim (simulated stimuli) star Tally Isham, whose biotech-enhanced senses record her immediate experience for sensory download by the general public: reality TV on steroids.In these stories, just as in his novels, Gibson’s abstractions stand in concrete relief against the background of a cultural infrastructure too immediate and too gritty to be purely futuristic or theoretical. There’s no question of his prescience. Read him if you haven’t already.
—mentor&muse

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