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A review by bergsteiger
Burning Chrome by William Gibson
2.0
I have always been reluctant to pick Gibson up again. I had to read Neuromancer for a college course and I was bored to tears by it. He was the rave back then, but I just couldn't get see it. Fast forward 30 years and someone recommends to me Burning Chrome.
Burning Chrome is a selection of short stories. Most of them follow a basic outline. Some sort of job/caper, enter femme fatale, flashbacks, job goes awry in some fashion usually related to femme fatale. A lot of these read like an unpolished, ragged Richard K. Morgan.
I just finished this book last night and the only stories that I can recall in any detail were the opener "Johnny Mnemonic" which followed his standard cyberpunk trope, but had a little more flavor to it (the story had a junkie war dolphin - I mean that's kinda cool). The other story that stood out was one one that had a co-author and was called "The Belonging Kind". It wasn't great, but it was centered around an interesting idea, so it stuck with me.
But overall...big bust. Pretty sure this will be my last attempt at reading Gibson. Simply being an early pioneer in cyberpunk (his claim to fame), doesn't mean he is an entertaining author. I will admit, that I generally feel like this genre is about the "vibe" of the stories and less about content/quality, so I have some of my own internal biases when reading anything labeled cyberpunk, but at the end of the day it would just be hard to recommend this book to most people.
Burning Chrome is a selection of short stories. Most of them follow a basic outline. Some sort of job/caper, enter femme fatale, flashbacks, job goes awry in some fashion usually related to femme fatale. A lot of these read like an unpolished, ragged Richard K. Morgan.
I just finished this book last night and the only stories that I can recall in any detail were the opener "Johnny Mnemonic" which followed his standard cyberpunk trope, but had a little more flavor to it (the story had a junkie war dolphin - I mean that's kinda cool). The other story that stood out was one one that had a co-author and was called "The Belonging Kind". It wasn't great, but it was centered around an interesting idea, so it stuck with me.
But overall...big bust. Pretty sure this will be my last attempt at reading Gibson. Simply being an early pioneer in cyberpunk (his claim to fame), doesn't mean he is an entertaining author. I will admit, that I generally feel like this genre is about the "vibe" of the stories and less about content/quality, so I have some of my own internal biases when reading anything labeled cyberpunk, but at the end of the day it would just be hard to recommend this book to most people.