# Burning Chrome
by [William Gibson](/books/authors/william_gibson/) and [John Shirley](/books/authors/john_shirley/) and [Bruce Sterling](/books/authors/bruce_sterling/) and [Michael Swanwick](/books/authors/michael_swanwick/)
Book 0 of [Sprawl](/books/series/sprawl/)
★★★★☆
## Review
_Burning Chrome_ is a collection of short stories by William Gibson. It features both solo and collaborative
works, some of which are the earliest written stories in the Sprawl
universe.
_Burning Chrome_ was published after [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) and [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/),
but most of the stories were written years earlier. Reading them, you can see
Gibson finding the prose style, the ideas, and the
characters that would make the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) trilogy such a masterwork.
The prose in the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) trilogy is light, sparse, almost poetic. Gibson doesn't tell you everything; he gives you just enough
to leave an impression and trusts your mind to fill in the rest. These early
stories are much heavier, slower, the descriptions longer. But you can see him
finding his voice, and by [_New Rose Hotel_](/books/burning_chrome/#new-rose-hotel) the prose is stripped down and
lean.
Many of the ideas and themes Gibson expands in his novels
were first tested out in these short stories: cyberspace, simstim, the body as
currency, what part of you is really _you_. Three of the stories are even the
novels in miniature: [_Burning Chrome_](/books/burning_chrome/#burning-chrome) is [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/)'s heist, [_New Rose Hotel_](/books/burning_chrome/#new-rose-hotel) is [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/)'s corporate extraction, and [_The Winter Market_](/books/burning_chrome/#the-winter-market) asks the same questions about uploading and identity as
[_Mona Lisa Overdrive_](/books/mona_lisa_overdrive/).
Gibson used these stories to work out characters, too.
Some---like Molly and the Finn---are brought over directly. Others are
prototypes, mixing together ideas he refines later; I'll point a few of these
out in the story reviews.
There's another pattern in these stories, one that didn't make it into the
novels: nearly every one is narrated by a man outpaced by a woman with more
agency. She drives the action, she gets what she wants, and more often than
not she leaves him behind. Johnny is dragged along by Molly. The narrator of
[_New Rose Hotel_](/books/burning_chrome/#new-rose-hotel) recounts how Sandii burned him while he waits to die.
Casey is left coming to terms with Lise's upload. We only see these women
through someone else's eyes. But in the novels Gibson lets
them tell their own stories: Molly, Marly, Angela, Mona, and Kumiko all get
their own chapters.
### _Johnny Mnemonic_ {#johnny-mnemonic}
★★★★☆
[_Johnny Mnemonic_](/books/burning_chrome/#johnny-mnemonic) is an early [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) story featuring Johnny---a man
able to store proprietary data in his head---and Molly---the street samurai
from [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) and [_Mona Lisa Overdrive_](/books/mona_lisa_overdrive/). The Yakuza want Johnny
dead because his mind holds their stolen data, and Molly is excited to test
her enhancements against a vat-grown ninja. Unlike most of the other stories
here, this one is a direct prequel: Molly is one of the main characters in the
trilogy, and Johnny is mentioned as part of her backstory.
This story also introduces the theme that comes back again and again in the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/): what modifying yourself really costs. Johnny makes a living storing
other people's secrets but has no control over what gets put there. Molly has
gained strength, speed, but as we see in [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/), they came at a
high price.
[_Johnny Mnemonic_](/books/burning_chrome/#johnny-mnemonic) also starts to get at the weirdness of the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/)
that makes it unique. It's not all rain-slicked streets and towering zaibatsu
and neon lights in cyberspace; it's also heroin-addicted uplifted dolphins
(two years before Brin's _Startide Rising_), ninjas with
monomolecular wire in their thumbs, and outcasts who implant animal teeth and
live in the rafters of the geodesic domes. It's something Gibson learned from [Brunner](/books/authors/john_brunner/)'s [_Stand on Zanzibar_](/books/stand_on_zanzibar/): the weirdness makes the future feel more real.
### _The Gernsback Continuum_ {#the-gernsback-continuum}
★★★☆☆
Gibson doesn't write horror, but much of what he writes is
horrifying. [_The Gernsback Continuum_](/books/burning_chrome/#the-gernsback-continuum) inverts his usual horror three ways.
He normally looks at a possible future; here he looks back at a future that
never arrived. The horror is normally in the details---puppet shops,
fast-growing custom-tailored cancers---so commonplace the prose hardly has
time for them; here nothing is grim, and everything is seamless, smooth, fast,
and interchangeable. And the squalor is usually the disease, the thing that's
wrong with the world; here it's the cure, with porn, bad television, and the
ugly reality the only things that can break the spell.
But the prose is clunky and the characters don't matter. It's a story all
about the _idea_, and that's not enough for me.
### _Fragments of a Hologram Rose_ {#fragments-of-a-hologram-rose}
★★★☆☆
Gibson's first published story, built around the
idea that a fragment of a hologram still gives you the whole picture. Gibson gives us fragments of Parker's life, and of his
ex-girlfriend's via ASP---a precursor to simstim---and lets us form the
picture. This is the exact style I love in the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) trilogy, but he
doesn't quite land it here.
There's also a small bit about ASP stars becoming more androgynous because
viewers can't adapt to recordings made by a different gender. It reminded me
of [Fall](/books/authors/isabel_fall/)'s [_I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter_](/books/i_sexually_identify_as_an_attack_helicopter/), where Barb changes her gender
to fly better.
### _The Belonging Kind_ {#the-belonging-kind}
by [William Gibson](/books/authors/william_gibson/) and [John Shirley](/books/authors/john_shirley/)
★★☆☆☆
A bizarre tale about a species that subsists on alcohol and uses human form as
camouflage. The main character is a linguist who can't make small talk; he
becomes obsessed with one of the creatures, turns into one himself, and
finally blends in. A throwaway idea and little else.
### _Hinterlands_ {#hinterlands}
★★★★★
[_Hinterlands_](/books/burning_chrome/#hinterlands) is the best story in _Burning Chrome_. It perfectly balances
the wonder and dread I love in science fiction. It's about the surrogates on a
space station whose job is to meet astronauts returning through the wormhole.
Most explorers kill themselves immediately, but a few share transformative
knowledge before their insanity gets to them.
Gibson captures both the trauma the surrogates carry from
bonding with people who are going to die and the guilt and loss they feel at
having tried to go through the wormhole and been rejected: every surrogate is
a failed explorer. The narrator says that at the edge of the highway human
understanding breaks down, leaving only the language of the shaman and
cabalist. It's the same idea Gibson builds [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/) around: when power is incomprehensible, religion is the only framework
humans have to understand it.
Only a few other stories balance wonder and dread the way this story does: [Arkady](/books/authors/arkady_strugatsky/) and [Boris Strugatsky](/books/authors/boris_strugatsky/)'s [_Roadside Picnic_](/books/roadside_picnic/), of course, which this
story is influenced by; [Stross](/books/authors/charles_stross/)'s _A Colder War_; [Watts](/books/authors/peter_watts/)'s [_Firefall_](/books/series/firefall/); [_Disco Elysium_](/books/disco_elysium/). It's this tension
between awe and horror that I love so much in the best science fiction.
And the idea of incomprehensible objects arriving from elsewhere isn't limited
to [_Hinterlands_](/books/burning_chrome/#hinterlands) or [_Roadside Picnic_](/books/roadside_picnic/). [Banks](/books/authors/iain_m_banks/) plays it
for comedy in [_Cleaning Up_](/books/the_state_of_the_art/#cleaning-up), where aliens dump their trash on us, and [qntm](/books/authors/qntm/) makes it deliberately hostile it in [_A Powerful Culture_](/books/valuable_humans_in_transit_and_other_stories/#a-powerful-culture), where
other dimensions dump toxic waste on Earth.
### _Red Star, Winter Orbit_ {#red-star-winter-orbit}
by [William Gibson](/books/authors/william_gibson/) and [Bruce Sterling](/books/authors/bruce_sterling/)
★★★☆☆
This story takes place on a decaying, soon-to-be-abandoned Soviet space
station. The Soviets won the Cold War, went to the Moon and to Mars, and now
everything is crumbling. It's almost an alternate history of the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/),
where instead of Japan winning and the zaibatsu taking over, the Soviets did
and then collapsed.
Reggae shows up briefly in this story, and in a few others in _Burning Chrome_.
Gibson continued this trend of using Afro-Caribbean
culture throughout the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) trilogy: the Rastafarian Zion cluster in
[_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) and the Haitian Vodou Loa in [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/).
### _New Rose Hotel_ {#new-rose-hotel}
★★★★★
[_New Rose Hotel_](/books/burning_chrome/#new-rose-hotel) is my other favorite story in the collection. The
narrator and his partner help scientists defect from one company to another,
and they hire Sandii to seduce a Maas Biolabs scientist so they can sell him
to Hosaka. But Maas isn't a towering zaibatsu. It's a lean startup, moving
fast, all edge, a predator among the corporations. Sandii has her own score to
settle with Hosaka, and Maas gives her the means to do it.
Gibson has finally honed his noir style and lean prose.
The whole story is Chandler-esque: a man in a coffin hotel,
going over every detail of the woman who ruined him, still unable to let go.
This story directly explores an idea that's only implicit in the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) trilogy: that corporations are a life form, that they are artificial
intelligences. That's a particularly interesting idea now, as we debate
whether [LLMs][llm] are _real AI_ while overlooking the fact that we've
already had artificial intelligences for centuries. [Stross](/books/authors/charles_stross/)'s [_Accelerando_](/books/accelerando/) does the same thing, although there he makes it explicit as
corporations literally evolve past their human founders.
[llm]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
### _The Winter Market_ {#the-winter-market}
★★★★☆
A story that reads like something from the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) but isn't. Casey is a
stim editor (another simstim precursor) who discovers Lise, a disabled artist.
People love her work because the feeling she conveys of being trapped by her
body is a more intense version of what the down-and-out populace feels. She
uses Casey to become a star, which gives her the chance to upload her mind and
escape her body. There's an irony there: her body is what made her art, but
she casts it aside anyway.
This story asks whether the upload is still Lise. Casey doesn't think so, and
he dreads talking to her afterward, afraid she'll convince him otherwise. It's
a question science fiction keeps asking: [qntm](/books/authors/qntm/)'s [_Lena_](/books/valuable_humans_in_transit_and_other_stories/#lena), [Banks](/books/authors/iain_m_banks/)'s [_Surface Detail_](/books/surface_detail/), [Taylor](/books/authors/dennis_e_taylor/)'s [_Bobiverse_](/books/series/bobiverse/), and Gibson himself across the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/)
novels---with Dixie Flatline, with the Count, and with Angie.
Angie is Lise refined: another addicted simstim star, another escape through
upload. Rubin, an artist who builds things out of _gomi_, is another
prototype: he becomes Slick from [_Mona Lisa Overdrive_](/books/mona_lisa_overdrive/).
### _Dogfight_ {#dogfight}
by [William Gibson](/books/authors/william_gibson/) and [Michael Swanwick](/books/authors/michael_swanwick/)
★★★☆☆
The third and final collaboration in the collection, [_Dogfight_](/books/burning_chrome/#dogfight), is about
a drifter who cheats his way to winning at video games. In the process he
destroys a disabled veteran's only source of meaning and ruins his own
fledgling relationship. It's an inversion of the women-with-agency pattern in
the rest of _Burning Chrome_.
The story isn't set in the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/), but it reads as another prototype,
with reflex-improving drugged-out fighter pilots, personal holographic
projections like the ones Riviera uses in [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/), and punishments
that rewrite your personality like Slick's in [_Mona Lisa Overdrive_](/books/mona_lisa_overdrive/).
### _Burning Chrome_ {#burning-chrome}
★★★★☆
This story is a straightforward heist: Bobby Quine and Automatic Jack burn
Chrome, a mob-connected fixer, and redistribute her money. But behind the
simple story are ideas that would be revisited in the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) novels.
It's the first place Gibson describes cyberspace, a
neon-lit geometric world you can jack into to steal a billion dollars. And
Rikki, Bobby's muse, sells herself at Chrome's puppet shop for the Zeiss Ikon
eyes she needs to be a simstim star. It's the same trade Molly makes in [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/): consciousness and bodily autonomy for agency.
This story gives us one of Gibson's most famous
lines: "The street finds its own uses for things".
## Reviews that mention _Burning Chrome_
- [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/)†
- [_Fahrenheit 451_](/books/fahrenheit_451/)
- [_Hyperion_](/books/hyperion/)
- [_Mona Lisa Overdrive_](/books/mona_lisa_overdrive/)
- [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/)
† _Mentioned via a link to the series._
## Related Books
- [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) by [William Gibson](/books/authors/william_gibson/) --- ★★★★★: Neuromancer, by William Gibson, is the first book in the Sprawl series, and one of the founding texts of cyberpunk. In it, Case, a hacker who can’t jack in anymore, and street samurai Molly Millions are hired by a mysterious ex-special forces agent to pull off a heist.
- [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/) by [William Gibson](/books/authors/william_gibson/) --- ★★★★★: Count Zero, by William Gibson, is the second book in the Sprawl series. It follows three strangers—a teenage hacker on his first run, a mercenary hired to extract a defecting scientist, and an art dealer tracking down mysterious boxes—as they’re pulled into a struggle between zaibatsus, the ultra-rich, and something stranger.
- [_Mona Lisa Overdrive_](/books/mona_lisa_overdrive/) by [William Gibson](/books/authors/william_gibson/) --- ★★★★★: Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson, is the third and final book in the Sprawl series. It brings together characters from both previous books—Molly, Angela, Bobby, and the ghost of 3Jane—around a device that can hold the entirety of cyberspace, and maybe a human soul.