Burning Chrome

As a collection of short stories it's difficult to give an overall review. I found it quite incohesive and I struggled to keep focus on it.

You can't dispute the atmosphere and formative themes of the cyberpunk genre. You can see the seeds of neuromancer, the matrix, and a few other more modern cyberpunk episodes. I'd suggest it for fans of the genre, but certainly not as an entry point or taster.

Johnny Mnemonic was probably my favourite - I didn't realise it had a film so I'm going to need to watch that now. It follows a data courier who stores sensitive information in his brain - you can probably guess how that goes.

El movimiento cyberpunk fue básicamente el despertar de la ciencia ficción a la realidad: el futuro hipertecnológico tan esperado estaba llegando, y no se parecía en nada a nuestros sueños.

Es más, era una pesadilla.

Ni siquiera nos hacía el favor de ser una distopía o un apocalipsis, era peor que eso.

El futuro hipertecnológico era mediocre, triste, corrupto, sucio y con olor a mierda entre los chips y los implantes biológicos.

Y la ciencia ficción tenía que hacer algo con eso.

Así, en los 80s, entre camperas con corderito y películas de Robert Zemeckis, los autores cyberpunk escribían sobre mafias transnacionales controlando el flujo de tados, fingerprints digitales que permiten ubicar a cualquier persona, fake news, dinero digital, y ciberespacio.

Y cabe señalar que la Internet apenas se había inventado.

"Jonny Menmonic" es un ejemplo canónico de la literatura de Gibson en su versión más harcore

Leímos "Johnny Mnemonic" en la edición número 26 de nuestro Club de #LecturaMastodontica

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...when there's a bike made of paper and carbon and whathaveyou... yeah.

Burning Chrome collects Gibson's short fiction into a great, tight bundle. It is all tied together and flows nicely, and it shows his evolution as a writer. Even his early work and the bits I like less are all exactly where they should be. While Gibson is a better novelist IMHO, his short fiction still packs a punch. Well worth reading for any Gibson fans, but perhaps lacking without the context of his longer works.

Of the stories within, Johnny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome are my favorites, and their traces are seen in Neuromancer and Stephenson's The Diamond Age.