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Burning Chrome
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| List Price: | £7.99 |
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Product Description
Ten brilliant, seminal, hard-edged, nerve-enhancing stories from the most influential science fiction writer of our time. Ten brilliant, seminal, hard-edged, nerve-enhancing stories from the most influential science fiction writer of our time. Since they were first published in the 1980s, Gibson's vision has become a touchstone -- his lapidary prose seethes with buzz-phrases newly minted yet destined to be current well in to the future. Lowlife characters, ghosts and hallucinations haunt the malls and plazas of an intensely realized holographic world, a name-brand society, with cloned Ninja bodyguards, retro fashions, stunning ideas. Gibson in the year 2000 is the unchallenged guru, prophet and voice of the new cybernetic world order and virtual reality.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #30210 in Books
- Published on: 1995-11-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 224 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
'A fistful of fast, challenging, hot-wired short stories' New Musical Express 'Furiously inventive, brilliantly written, the cutting edge of sf' Guardian 'Some subversives are still at work proving that SF can pack its strongest blows into its shortest works! He's at his best dealing with the victims of the new, the people burnt out by drugs, computers, huge corporations or the strangeness of space' Fiction Magazine 'At once a lament and a critique, these stories show the way SF is being rewired. Gibson, his finger jitteringly on the fast-forward button, shows the direction in which our literature might be headed' The Times
About the Author
William Gibson was born in 1948. He was raised and educated in 'southern Lovecraftian' Virginia, USA, but moved to Canada soon after leaving school. He now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is married and has two children.
Customer Reviews
A great collection of short stories not to be missed
Gibson gives his best in the hard work of recalling, fixing and arranging moments in short, moving and touchy stories. Great stories like "Burning Chrome", "Fragments of a hologram rose", "Jhonny Mnemonic" or "New Rose Hotel" show the hints of the world he unrolls in his novels, but maybe the most wonderful thing is seeing him at work on completly different styles than usual, like in the astinishing "Hinterand". A great collection, a must to every Gibson-fan.
Gibson lives in the details
Although I love Neuromancer and Gibson's other books, its in his short stories he really excels. He manages to paint a complete world in a page or two, fleshing out his characters into real people. Some of the stories seem to be in the world of the sprawl, others are in very different places. All have the strange tension of living in a place on the edge of change, the Edge where console cowboys cut ICE from the datacores of an Old/Young woman or burned out hustlers dogfight holographic planes around the lightbulbs of seedy bars. Each story is Short, sharp and glorious.
A collection that you must not miss.
This collection contains ten stories, seven of which are solo works by William Gibson and the other three are collaborations. Nine appeared previously between 1977 and 1985 and one was new for this collection.
Gibson writes hard, technical cyber-punk SF with the art of a real master of the short story genre. Good SF shorts are of course all about ideas, situations and snappy plot twists but great examples of this genre also pack in characters that you can understand and root for and worlds that come to life in your head. It is hard to do that and only a handful of writers can turn out work of this quality.
The opening shot in the book, "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those rare tales that burns its way into your head. Reading it is almost like being there watching the events unfold. The narrative makes the outlandish grunge-tech future come to life and it is easy to see how this tale inspired the making of a movie.
It is a powerful start and the rest of the book does not disappoint. From the anonymous barfly world of "The Belonging Kind", up into the dying orbit of an old Russian space station in "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and back to the seedy hacker world of "Burning Chrome" Gibson delivers a set of tales for which the phrase "assault on the senses" is no exaggeration.
The book is a fine introduction to both Gibson and the cyber-punk genre and it is a book that every SF fan should own and re-read regularly. If you like it and to want to explore similar work, I'd suggest "A Good Old Fashioned Future" by Bruce Sterling, or the "Mirrorshades" anthology.
