#burningchrome — Public Fediverse posts
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CW: Thoughts on Burning Chrome by William Gibson
This is a collection of short stories, completely independent, without any overarching story line or unified setting other than being dystopian in nature.
Despite being hailed as the progenitor for the Sprawl series of classic cyberpunk novels, not all the stories in Burning Chrome are cyberpunk. There's quite a number which is more traditional sci-fi.
Themes, narrative, and writing quality vary quite a bit too, so on average it comes out quite meh, even when there are very solid entries with engaging stories and distinct characters.
Even though I started this for Johnny Mnemonic story, the real highlight for me was the penultimate Burning Chrome, which undoubtedly served as a foundation for many cyberpunk stories that came afterwards. All the underpinnings of what we consider a cyberpunk now, were right there, painted with thick neon colors: the nonsensical yet plausible computer jargon, virtual reality visualization of cyberspace, the ICE firewalls, the cybernetic implants, the broken lives.
Kobo edition is alright but has some annoying formatting issues like zero margins between sections and weird headers.
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Catching up with this week’s episode of #ThePeripheral I probably ought to get around to reading the book, but I haven’t actually read any Gibson since #Neuromancer, #BurningChrome and #CountZero were new and exciting.