Just as space opera was written back before anybody knew the realities of space travel, cyberpunk was written before anyone knew the realities of the internet. Instead of the cumbersome and clunky virtual reality user interfaces, and “jacking in”, we went with the more boring, economical methods: a little white search box on a screen, and fingers on keys or key analogs. The technological tropes of the genre were one possible direction for things to head.

When I read cyberpunk now, nearing the third decade of the twenty-first century, it’s hard to think of it as anything other than a form of retrofuturism. Three of them, (Johnny Mnemonic, New Rose Hotel, and Burning Chrome) are set in the same universe as Gibson’s Sprawl series ( Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), with some of their characters and events mentioned or referenced in the main novels.Īs a rambling aside, I was born in 1984, making me much too young to have experienced cyberpunk when it was new and revolutionary. Unlike a lot of short fiction collections, this one isn’t a totally mixed bag, most of the stories ranging from “good” to “great”. As a genre it would go on to live a fairly short life, plateauing in the late eighties, followed by a handful of peak post-cyberpunk moments in the nineties ( Snow Crash, Ghost in the Shell) culminating in The Matrix and then almost immediately fading into relative obscurity.īurning Chrome collects Gibson’s short fiction, mostly published in OMNI magazine in the early eighties. Ridley Scott gave us the visual aesthetic with Blade Runner, but Gibson firmly established Cyberpunk as a literary movement. William Gibson blew the Science Fiction world wide open in the mid eighties with his cyberpunk novels, particularly the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K.

Burning chrome by william gibson