Customer Reviews
Very nearly a cyberpunk genre defining classic, but that crown has to go to Gibson's Neuromancer - By: Peter Debney, 29 Oct 2008 
Gangsters, double crosses, hustles, halllucinogenics, neural interfaces, virtual reality: elements of the past & future fused together. Burning Chrome is a drug-fuelled, high-tech, rollercoaster ride in the dark. Packed with fragmented sentences & jargon, Burning Chrome is not an easy read, but a compelling one. These stories will not be to everyone's likening. They are a difficult read, packed with unpleasant characters in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes there is a lesson to be learned, but generallly only the winning matters. They are as beguiling as a car crash. In some other books, the future is bright. In Burning Chrome, it may be orange but it is dark & scary. Inhabited with gangsters committing high-tech crimes or bio-terrorism, this is not a pleasant place to be.
Gibson's aggressive poetry is brutallly beautiful. The prose is fragmented; quantum. Perception jumps. Vision blurs as if through a drugged haze. Jargon real & invented beguile & bamboozle. Gibson himself, like Philip K Dick, was no stranger to narcotics & his experience is made flesh in these stories. Published in magazines between 1977 & 84, these stories came at the start of the revolution in popular computing & a sea change in science fiction. The cyberpunk stories of Gibson & his collaborators threw out the shiny futures & political dystopias, & brought in a new dystopian vision where mega-corporations & organised crime ruled (though sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference). These stories are not Star Trek, but criminals with computers; lock, stock & two smoking hard drives. The future has brought technology but it has not cured us of the sins of humanity; it has only enabled new ones.
This is classic cyberpunk in bite-sized portions.
There are No Maps For These QuickSilver Territories - By: NeuroSplicer, 27 Sep 2007 
It can be stated that it is worthy for one to learn English only to be able to read NEW ROSE HOTEL in the original. No translation can do justice to Gibson's fresh prose. I realize that the cannon-setters might not agree, however, for me, these are the BEST 28 pages ever written in English. With Gibson SF entered its Golden Age.
All of the short stories contained are excellent. However, my favorites are alll of the three Sprawl ones: JOHNY MNEMONIC, NEW ROSE HOTEL & BURNING CHROME; at par is the Soviet retro (nowadays) HINTERLANDS.
Never before or since have I came upon comparable poetic dreamscapes of futuristic noir dystopia. The images are so concentrated they just burst from the reader's mind to create a detailed alternative reality. And it is not that the Novels are diluted - they are just more of the good stuff!
My advice: read BURNING CHROME *AFTER* the famous trilogy (NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO, MONA LISA OVERDRIVE). They will help you understand the precursor ideas for the rich atmospheric world that followed.
[Do not watch the NEW ROSE HOTEL movie. Do so for JOHNY MNEMONIC neither. They do no justice to these literature gems].
Highly Recommended!
Recommended -- but with reservations. - By: Mr. Patrick A. Harrington, 22 Dec 2001 William Gibson is best known as the author of Neuromancer -- his first novel, which caused him to be hailed in The Sunday Times as "the information age's resident populist prophet".
The book reviewed here is a collection of ten short stories, including his first published story Fragments of a Hologram Rose from 1977.
Gibson's style has been described as "a combination of low-life & high-tech". This collection shows how perceptive he can be in observing both. Gibson doesn't just use technology as a back-drop or to provide props; he considers the effects that developments in technology might have upon individuals & societies. In Johnny Mnemonic for example a character explains:--
"We're an information economy. They teach you that at school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified."
Gibson describes also the detail of low-life settings. In this collection there are very good descriptions of different types of bars in The Belonging Kind. He paints portraits of different characters, Deke in Dogfight, Lese in The Winter Market, with different colours & shades.
Ultimately, however, he extrapolates from a mass (or media) consciousness of the present. Gibson has interesting things to say but he is not a prophet. The future will not be the same as his stories. The Soviet Union has not dominated space research (as in Red Star, Winter Orbit), in fact it no longer exists. Many future developments will derive not from mass actions or popular consciousness, but from the work of "outsiders". Instead of looking just at what is now considered "central", perhaps he should view what is emerging at the edge....
A collection that you must not miss. - By: , 27 May 2001 This collection contains ten stories, seven of which are solo works by William Gibson & the other three are collaborations. Nine appeared previously between 1977 & 1985 & one was new for this collection.
Gibson writes hard, technical cyber-punk SF with the art of a real master of the short story genre. Good SF shorts are of course alll about ideas, situations & snappy plot twists but great examples of this genre also pack in characters that you can understand & root for & worlds that come to life in your head. It is hard to do that & only a handful of writers can turn out work of this quality.
The opening shot in the book, "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those rare tales that burns its way into your head. Reading it is almost like being there watching the events unfold. The narrative makes the outlandish grunge-tech future come to life & it is easy to see how this tale inspired the making of a movie.
It is a powerful start & the rest of the book does not disappoint. From the anonymous barfly world of "The Belonging Kind", up into the dying orbit of an old Russian space station in "Red Star, Winter Orbit" & back to the seedy hacker world of "Burning Chrome" Gibson delivers a set of tales for which the phrase "assault on the senses" is no exaggeration.
The book is a fine introduction to both Gibson & the cyber-punk genre & it is a book that every SF fan should own & re-read regularly. If you like it & to want to explore similar work, I'd suggest "A Good Old Fashioned Future" by Bruce Sterling, or the "Mirrorshades" anthology.
A great collection of short stories not to be missed - By: , 11 Oct 2000 Gibson gives his best in the hard work of recallling, fixing & arranging moments in short, moving & touchy stories. Great stories like "Burning Chrome", "Fragments of a hologram rose", "Jhonny Mnemonic" or "New Rose Hotel" show the hints of the world he unrolls in his novels, but maybe the most wonderful thing is seeing him at work on completly different styles than usual, like in the astinishing "Hinterand". A great collection, a must to every Gibson-fan.
