I read William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, the series of books beginning with Neuromancer, a few years ago, and was blown away by it. But coming back to him after a few years, and knowing the sci-fi genre a little better, it’s easy to see that he didn’t so much invent cyberpunk - whatever exactly that is - as cleverly cobble together ideas that were already present. The seeds of his new sub-genre were present as far back as Bester’s The Demolished Man and Delany’s Babel-17, but Gibson brought them together, selecting with an eye for a future that made perfect sense in the eighties. His innovation was more a sensibility than anything, and his great revelation wasn’t that computers were going to become more important, that fashions would get more bizarre, that virtual worlds would come to mean more to some people than the real one - it was to see clearly that in the future people would be just as lost, greedy, self-absorbed and generally screwed up as they’ve always been.
That isn’t to diminish Gibson’s work, or to say that he was something other than a great innovator. Burning Chrome, a collection bringing together short works originally published between 1977 and 1986, has aged badly in places - because it relies heavily on technology and in many ways technology has already outstripped Gibson’s vision - but even with that caveat, it’s still amazingly fresh and vibrant stuff.
It’s also proof, if it were needed, that Gibson is more than a one trick pony. Burning Chrome splits about equally between sprawl stories and other works. Those in the first category all follow a similar pattern - initially the tech and jargon are overwhelming, and then about half way through it starts to make a kind of sense, and the characters come into focus. Of these, Johnny Mnemonic remains stunning, and a reminder of what a complete travesty the film was; but it’s Dogfight, co-written with Michael Swanwick, that leaves the longest-lasting impression - perhaps because it strikes the most satisfying balance between character and setting. Gibson pulls the same trick time and again, convincing you that his protagonists are subservient to his brilliantly-realised background before shifting focus and - by the end - turning it all around.
It’s a neat stunt, and it doesn’t get tired. But it wouldn’t work quite so well without the non-sprawl stories to offer variety. Of those, my personal favourite was The Gernsback Continuum, a well-intentioned mockery of sci-fi’s extravagant traditions couched in a slyly unsettling horror story. Other highlights are The Belonging Kind, a piece of straight horror that’s not stunningly original but no less effective for it, and Red Star, Winter Orbit, a poignant tale of astronauts left behind in society’s headlong rush into the future.
This is a great collection, indispensable for Gibson fans and for anyone with the least interest in modern science-fiction. That’s partly because the stories are, for the most part, excellent - but it’s also fascinating to watch Gibson building a subgenre, and a whole new aesthetic. Few genre works have had as much impact as Neuromancer and nothing in Burning Chrome is quite that perfect - but this is where cyberpunk was constructed, and it’s an amazing thing to watch.
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