Burning Chrome by William Gibson
"Burning Chrome" is a collection of ten short stories by William Gibson, primarily set in a near-future world characterized by high technology, organized crime, and stark economic divisions. The collection is known for its dark themes and stylistic ambiguity, reflecting Gibson's hallmark cyberpunk aesthetic. Three of the stories—"New Rose Hotel," "Johnny Mnemonic," and "Burning Chrome"—are set in the Sprawl, a dystopian environment dominated by powerful megacorporations and the struggle of individuals against these forces.
In "New Rose Hotel," a corporate betrayal leads to deadly consequences, while "Johnny Mnemonic" follows a data courier who must evade danger after becoming a target for the Yakuza. "Burning Chrome" features two hackers who aim to dismantle a crime lord's financial empire. Other stories, such as "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" and "Winter Market," explore themes of memory, identity, and loss within similarly oppressive settings.
Additionally, the collection includes tales set in outer space, like "Red Star, Winter Orbit," which depicts a decaying Soviet space station, and "Hinterlands," where explorers return from a mysterious area with harrowing consequences. Two stories, co-written or inspired by other writers, deviate from the typical high-tech tone, introducing surreal elements. Overall, "Burning Chrome" offers a multifaceted exploration of human experience in technologically advanced yet morally ambiguous landscapes.
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Subject Terms
Burning Chrome
First published: 1986
Type of work: Stories
Type of plot: Science fiction—cyberpunk
Time of work: Primarily the early twenty-first century, with some stories set in the 1980’s
Locale: Earth and elsewhere in the solar system
The Plot
A collection of primarily near-future stories, Burning Chrome demonstrates the style, ambiguity, and dark vision characteristic of William Gibson’s work. The ten stories in this collection can be divided into four groups on the basis of their settings.
“New Rose Hotel,” “Johnny Mnemonic,” and “Burning Chrome” are stories of the Sprawl, set in the early twenty-first century Earth further developed in the novels Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). High technology, organized crime, powerful megacorporations, and an economy driven by information services dominate a world divided sharply into haves and have-nots. These three short stories set up the basic patterns of Sprawl conflict: individuals against powerful corporations, individuals against organized crime, and low-power individuals against high-power individuals. In “New Rose Hotel,” the nameless narrator details the machinations of corporate headhunters and the inexorable, deadly vengeance of their employer after a defection goes wrong. The title character of “Johnny Mnemonic” is a walking safebox for other people’s data. He is left with data stolen from the Yakuza, the Japanese crime syndicate, locked in his head after a client is killed. With the help of Molly Millions, a surgically enhanced bodyguard/assassin, and Jones, a drug-addicted former Navy Dolphin, Johnny evades the Yakuza and begins to make use of all the data he has ever stored. In “Burning Chrome,” Bobby Quine and Automatic Jack, hot-shot computer jockeys, use stolen Russian military software to break into the computer system of a local crime lord, Chrome, and destroy her power base by redistributing her financial assets.
“Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” “Winter Market,” and “Dogfight” are stories set in the Sprawl or in a world very similar to it. Stories in this group are also set against a background of a high-technology society with sharp economic extremes. “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” Gibson’s first published story, hinges on the reaction of the main character, Parker, to his lover’s desertion, his recollections of his past, and his inability to view his past or himself as a whole. “Winter Market” is the story of Lise, a neuroelectronic artist who has herself translated into the computer net shortly before she dies. It is told through the eyes of Casey, the recording editor who reworked her dreams and ambitions into best-selling software. In “Dogfight,” which Gibson wrote with Michael Swanwick, Deke finds a way out of his dead-end life by hustling “wetware” projection dogfights, but he destroys so much in pursuit of his victory, including his opponent’s will to live, that the victory is virtually meaningless.
“Red Star, Winter Orbit” and “Hinterlands” are both set in space, in a society in which power is still largely divided between the Americans and the Soviets. “Red Star, Winter Orbit,” a collaboration with Bruce Sterling, describes the decline of Kosmograd, a Soviet space station in a decaying orbit. “Hinterland” is a dark story in which Toby Halpert explains the workings of the Highway, a point in space where human space vehicles vanish and eventually reappear, the occupants bringing back strange artifacts and new information. The problem is that most occupants come back insane or dead. Toby’s job is to meet the ones that come back alive and sane and to keep them that way, if he can.
The remaining two stories differ from the rest of the collection in tone as well as setting. Set in the 1980’s, both lack the gritty high-tech atmosphere common to the other stories and share instead a sense of the surreal. “The Belonging Kind,” cowritten with John Shirley, describes a kind of animal evolved to live within urban structures, mimicking people and changing like a chameleon to fit its various environments. The story details the slow metamorphosis of Coretti, a socially awkward linguist, into one of these animals. In “The Gernsback Continuum,” a photographer hired to document remnants of 1930’s American futuristic design begins to see what a friend calls “semiotic ghosts,” hallucinations of the 1980’s as they might have been, an ultimately dystopic vision he suppresses by watching bad television.
Bibliography
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Easterbrook, Neil. “The Arc of Our Destruction: Reversal and Erasure in Cyberpunk.” Science Fiction Studies 19, no. 3 (November, 1992): 378-394.
McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.
Olsen, Lance. William Gibson. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1992.
Slusser, George, and Tom Shippey, eds. Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.
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