Burning Chrome
by William Gibson
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Book Summary Information
Author: William GibsonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-07-29
ISBN: 0060539828
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Book Reviews of Burning Chrome
Book Review: Burning Chrome Shines Bright
Summary: 5 Stars
Adapted from [.....]
If 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.
Summary of Burning Chrome
Best-known for his seminal sf novel Neuromancer, William Gibson is actually best when writing short fiction. Tautly-written and suspenseful, Burning Chrome collects 10 of his best short stories with a preface from Bruce Sterling, now available for the first time in trade paperback. These brilliant, high-resolution stories show Gibson's characters and intensely-realized worlds at his absolute best, from the chip-enhanced couriers of "Johnny Mnemonic" to the street-tech melancholy of "Burning Chrome."
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.
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