• Title: Burning Chrome
• Author: William Gibson
• Genre/Subject: Cyberpunk pioneering SF
• Publisher: Harper Voyager
• Publication Date: 1987
• Start date: 4/16/24
• Finish date: 4/19/24

Review:

This is one of my rare re-reads and it was by design, not something that I read and halfway through figured that I had actually read this before. I did that with a few, remember that 25 years of this reading journal was read through a vodka filter.

I first discovered William Gibson when he was new and edgy in the late 1980s and I was in high school. I loved it then, like loved it immensely, and the 35 years that has elapsed since the first reading has not diminished that love.

I was particularly interested in reading the copyright dates for each of the stories. Fragments of a Hologram Rose is copyright 1977!! So the whole thing, the cyberpunk, hard sf, whatever we want to call it began in the 1970s. Or earlier if we consider Philip K. Dick… but that sort of “who was the first” inquiry is best left to drunken nerds at Comic Cons. I guess where I’m going with this is that I assumed it began at the moment I read Burning Chrome, but this is of course, well we all assume that the world begins with us.

Even the titles are pure, proper, unadulterated edge: New Rose Hotel, Hinterlands, Dogfight, Winter Market. So many memories wrapped up in this book. The years before I fell in and got stuck inside the vodka bottle. Not halcyon days, but good days.

My favorite line, and there are so many I love, but it’s a line from Winter Market:

“You wanna make it, editor?” “Could you feel it if I did?” Beat. Maybe she blinked, but her face never registered. “No,” she said “but sometimes I like to watch.”

Or consider the name of the movie, the simstim they made together: Kings of Sleep. Fuck me in the cyber ass this is just pure gold.

I loved this then, I love it now, and I’ll love it when I read it again and again. If I give it Five Stars, could you feel it?