BURNING CHROME by William Gibson
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Back in 1982, William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace,” and his first novel,
Neuromancer, published two years later, explored a virtual reality landscape
with a vividness of detail and intensity of conception that proved remarkably
prescient. As a result, Gibson is now heralded as the great prognosticator.
But his accuracy in predicting the future has led many to forget just how well
Gibson writes.
Of course, the received wisdom on genre writers is that they are sometimes
clever in their plots or in their raw ideas, but their prose is invariably banal and
plodding. Certainly, any number of famous science fiction writers deserve this
criticism. Most of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy is built out of cardboard
prose, but his blazing imagination redeems the work. Philip K. Dick is the
classic case of a writer who dazzles on a conceptual level, but rarely produces
a really good sentence. Many, many other examples could be cited. But
Gibson defies the conventional wisdom. His writing is breathtakingly good, and
if it fails to match the brilliance of his insights, it is only because the latter are
even more flamboyant.
Burning Chrome, a collection of short stories from the early 1980s, shows
Gibson at his best. The difficult of depicting a realistic future landscape in any
degree of detail forces many otherwise talented writers to fall back on small-
scale effects – isolated vignettes or one-trick pony tales which seem flat even
when they work their magic. Gibson’s landscapes, in contrast, have depth. We
get a flavor of social groups and demographics, but never in a heavy-handed
way. We sense the sprawling cities – and almost all of Gibson’s story-telling is
situated in densely populated urban areas -- and even grok what may lie on
its outskirts or its hidden recesses. We feel the pulse of society, its nightlife, its
compromises, its vices and blind spots. And all of these elements feel both
familiar and strange -- it is a future that we can recognize as an outgrowth of
our dysfunctional present.
But we also have the heroes of the stories. They hardly qualify as heroes,
even if we root for them, cheer on their successes, and lament their failures.
The human element in a Gibson story can be summed up succinctly in a
phrase – his protagonists are almost always lowlifes with totally rad
technology. Gibson fetishizes technology, especially dangerous cutting-edge
gadgets that his dissipated characters covet. Often the device plugs into their
brain, or some other part of their body. Or they swallow it hole, or get it
surgically implanted. If necessary, they lug it around in a suitcase. But it is
always hot stuff, three years ahead of what everybody else on the street is
using.
I have little patience when Gibson gets into his laundry list of gadgets, but for
him this is foreplay in a highly erotic game. Here is a dose from “New Rose
Hotel” in Burning Chrome: “A freezer. A fermenter. An incubator. An
electrophoresis system with integrated agarose cell and transilluminator. A
tissue embedder. A high-performance liquid chromatograph. A flow cytometer .
. .” You get the idea. These are the mementos that the narrator's ex-girlfriend
left behind – like the old pop song, “these foolish things remind me of you,” only
instead of the “cigarette that bears the lipstick traces” we get “four gross of
borosilicate scintillation vials.”
But don’t let the jargon and gadgets dissuade you from dipping into Gibson.
Although his stories appear, on a superficial level, to focus on technology, they
are really about the ways that waves of change, the fast-forward ethos of
modern-day life, simultaneously empower and cripple people and societies. As
such, he is neither overly utopian or dystopian. Indeed, more than any science
fiction writer of his generation, Gibson is comfortable with the equivocal and
sometimes even paradoxical nature of our love affair with the gizmos. The
characters in a Gibson story are like Michael Jackson and plastic surgery –
they can’t get enough of it, even when they sense its destructive toll. By
comparison the apocalyptic writers of yesteryear – or even last year, if one
considers Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road – seem
heavy handed by comparison. The future, Gibson seems to tell us, will never
be that simple.
And this is the reason, I suspect, that Gibson has been so successful as a
fortune teller, as a futurist charting our rapidly changing social landscape.
Other writers have tried to simplify the story, trace the broad outlines of a
purely linear progression into the future. But Gibson knows that reality is much
more multi-layered, full of unintended consequences and second-order
effects. And this is a sensibility that is rare in any writer, whether they are
looking into the future, or probing past and present.
Back in 1982, William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace,” and his first novel,
Neuromancer, published two years later, explored a virtual reality landscape
with a vividness of detail and intensity of conception that proved remarkably
prescient. As a result, Gibson is now heralded as the great prognosticator.
But his accuracy in predicting the future has led many to forget just how well
Gibson writes.
Of course, the received wisdom on genre writers is that they are sometimes
clever in their plots or in their raw ideas, but their prose is invariably banal and
plodding. Certainly, any number of famous science fiction writers deserve this
criticism. Most of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy is built out of cardboard
prose, but his blazing imagination redeems the work. Philip K. Dick is the
classic case of a writer who dazzles on a conceptual level, but rarely produces
a really good sentence. Many, many other examples could be cited. But
Gibson defies the conventional wisdom. His writing is breathtakingly good, and
if it fails to match the brilliance of his insights, it is only because the latter are
even more flamboyant.
Burning Chrome, a collection of short stories from the early 1980s, shows
Gibson at his best. The difficult of depicting a realistic future landscape in any
degree of detail forces many otherwise talented writers to fall back on small-
scale effects – isolated vignettes or one-trick pony tales which seem flat even
when they work their magic. Gibson’s landscapes, in contrast, have depth. We
get a flavor of social groups and demographics, but never in a heavy-handed
way. We sense the sprawling cities – and almost all of Gibson’s story-telling is
situated in densely populated urban areas -- and even grok what may lie on
its outskirts or its hidden recesses. We feel the pulse of society, its nightlife, its
compromises, its vices and blind spots. And all of these elements feel both
familiar and strange -- it is a future that we can recognize as an outgrowth of
our dysfunctional present.
But we also have the heroes of the stories. They hardly qualify as heroes,
even if we root for them, cheer on their successes, and lament their failures.
The human element in a Gibson story can be summed up succinctly in a
phrase – his protagonists are almost always lowlifes with totally rad
technology. Gibson fetishizes technology, especially dangerous cutting-edge
gadgets that his dissipated characters covet. Often the device plugs into their
brain, or some other part of their body. Or they swallow it hole, or get it
surgically implanted. If necessary, they lug it around in a suitcase. But it is
always hot stuff, three years ahead of what everybody else on the street is
using.
I have little patience when Gibson gets into his laundry list of gadgets, but for
him this is foreplay in a highly erotic game. Here is a dose from “New Rose
Hotel” in Burning Chrome: “A freezer. A fermenter. An incubator. An
electrophoresis system with integrated agarose cell and transilluminator. A
tissue embedder. A high-performance liquid chromatograph. A flow cytometer .
. .” You get the idea. These are the mementos that the narrator's ex-girlfriend
left behind – like the old pop song, “these foolish things remind me of you,” only
instead of the “cigarette that bears the lipstick traces” we get “four gross of
borosilicate scintillation vials.”
But don’t let the jargon and gadgets dissuade you from dipping into Gibson.
Although his stories appear, on a superficial level, to focus on technology, they
are really about the ways that waves of change, the fast-forward ethos of
modern-day life, simultaneously empower and cripple people and societies. As
such, he is neither overly utopian or dystopian. Indeed, more than any science
fiction writer of his generation, Gibson is comfortable with the equivocal and
sometimes even paradoxical nature of our love affair with the gizmos. The
characters in a Gibson story are like Michael Jackson and plastic surgery –
they can’t get enough of it, even when they sense its destructive toll. By
comparison the apocalyptic writers of yesteryear – or even last year, if one
considers Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road – seem
heavy handed by comparison. The future, Gibson seems to tell us, will never
be that simple.
And this is the reason, I suspect, that Gibson has been so successful as a
fortune teller, as a futurist charting our rapidly changing social landscape.
Other writers have tried to simplify the story, trace the broad outlines of a
purely linear progression into the future. But Gibson knows that reality is much
more multi-layered, full of unintended consequences and second-order
effects. And this is a sensibility that is rare in any writer, whether they are
looking into the future, or probing past and present.