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Burning Chrome  By  cover art

Burning Chrome

By: William Gibson
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Dennis Holland, Kevin Pariseau, Victor Bevine, Jay Snyder, Brian Nishii, L. J. Ganser, Oliver Wyman, Eric Michael Summerer, Marc Vietor
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Publisher's summary

William Gibson's dark visions of computer cowboys, bio-enhanced soldiers of fortune, and hi-tech lowlifes have won unprecedented praise. Included here are some of the most famous short fiction and novellas by the author of Count Zero and Neuromancer.
©2003 William Gibson (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Ten brilliant, streetwise, high-resolution stories from the man who coined the word cyberspace. Gibson's vision has become a touchstone in the emerging order of the 21st Century, from the computer-enhanced hustlers of Johnny Mnemonic to the technofetishist blues of Burning Chrome. With their vividly human characters and their remorseless, hot-wired futures, these stories are simultaneously science fiction at its sharpest and instantly recognizable Polaroids of the postmodern condition." (Amazon.com review)

What listeners say about Burning Chrome

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abstract art

YOUR THE REASON OUR KIDS ARE UGLY
Gibson starts out with an intro, in which he states that Asimov and Heinlein never did anything for him. He was influenced by Bester, Swanwick, and Sheckley. Another reviewer stated these stories were like abstract art. These statements should tell you how you will feel about these stories.

I am more of a Heinlein, Asimov person and prefer my art to be realistic, so I was not happy with these stories. If you are in the same camp as me, but want to try Gibson, I would suggest you start with Virtual Light. Virtual Light is my favorite Gibson book and I liked Al Tomorrow's Parties. I did not like this book, Spook Country, Count Zero or Neuromancer. You can not claim to be an expert in Sci-Fi fiction, if you have never read any William Gibson. In the middle 80's he was the hottest author in the field and was the leader in a new wave of Sci-Fi literature. Some of what you read today, you would not be reading if Gibson had never been published. So even though l did not like this, Kudo's to Gibson for having the vision to go a different direction then the norm.

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23 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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Anticipates Gibson's later, great Cyberpunk novels

A set of 10 short stories: early Gibson cyberpunk and sic-fi that anticipate both his SPRAWL and BLUE ANT series. All the Gibson tropes are there just waiting to bud and bloom. Gibson's cyberpunk, dark and messy near-future; his obsession with technology, music, clothing; his uncanny ability to describe and name the bleeding edge where culture and technology blend; his noirish tribalism; his satire; his slick style; his curvy asians. The book is an uneven group of stories that approximate a pimply and adolescent Gibson sitting confidently on a couch ready to hack your future and steal your dated sci-fi pulp.

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20 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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Hypnotic dreams of a gleaming, gritty future

If science fiction is a reflection of the time in which it was written, William Gibson’s short fiction captures the zeitgeist of the late 70s and early 80s, when the likely future was looking less and less like the clean utopia of Star Trek, and more like something else entirely. In his classic “Johnny Mnemonic”, Gibson extrapolates energy crises, urban decay, corporate wars, radical body alteration, Asian economic domination, punk rock, and the dark, gleaming possibilities of worlds behind the glow of computer screens towards a half-sinister neon-lit horizon. Imagine (if you can, ha) a reality where one’s data trail leaves no safety from enemies whose presence pervades the air, and the only retreat may be into the darkest shadows.

While the specific ideas of the future represented in this collection aren’t quite as on-target as they were when I first read it in the 90s (when it was already getting dated), the combination of Gibson’s cool, lean, mildly sardonic style and the smoldering intensity of his imagination still feels visionary. He gives us a few tastes of possibilities, and lets those tastes linger on the palate, dark and beautiful. “New Rose Hotel”, which concerns agents in a future biotech trade war, has an almost wistful, poetic quality, aided by Brian Nishi’s Asian-accented audio narration. To me, the only recent writer who is somewhat in the same territory is Paolo Bacigalupi (I recommend his short fiction collection).

Not every piece is cyberpunk. “The Gernsback Continuum” imagines a photographer whose travels around Los Angeles give him hallucinations of a Raygun Gothic future that never was, and is a little frightening in its cleanness. The Bruce Sterling collaboration “Red Star, Winter Orbit” deals with an entirely different sidestepped future (in retrospect), in which an aging cosmonaut on a space station above an Earth dominated by the Soviet Union realizes that the dream of space has abandoned his country -- but not necessarily humanity. In “The Belonging Kind”, a loner in a bar notices a girl making the nightclub rounds who fits in just a little too easily, which leads to a Twilight-zoney pondering of what a life free of social awkwardness might cost. It’s interesting to see other ways Gibson might have gone, if Neuromancer hadn’t been a hit.

But the real gems here, worth the price of admission to me, are “Dogfight” and “Burning Chrome”, prototypes for Gibson’s Sprawl novels. The former turns as tightly as WWI flying aces in combat, sending three characters -- a ratty young drifter who sells boosted merchandise, a privileged college student whose parents have taken drastic measures to keep their daughter from losing her shot at staying in the economic elite, and a used-up combat veteran, whose permanently-rewired brain leaves him but a single talent -- into a tragic duel of skill. This, more than any other piece, feels uncomfortably close to our current world, and the personality in Oliver Wyman’s reading only enhances the prose. And “Burning”’s hallucinatory vision of a dangerous hacker incursion into a forbidden fortress in cyberspace, while bearing almost no connection to anything in cyber-reality, is still stunning in its vividness.

Bottom line: even if he got things wrong about the future (who got it *right*, though?), William Gibson remains one of the finer visionaries of its allure and angst, and crackled in short form.

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14 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Top Notch Gibson

this is a collection of short stories but ones that tie quite a few of his universe is together from the sprawl most notably Neuromancer. William Gibson rates right up there with the fathers of sci-fi Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

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6 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Cyberpunk absolute essential

Far and away the best primer, not only for the work of the original sensei of Cyberpunk, but the entire genre itself. “Listens” in audiobook format much better than I’d expected, although I still recommend reading it (and all that would follow in the Sprawl Trilogy; also an absolute must, to see how these humble beginnings matured and flourished) in printed format first (or at least at some point); some portions are so rich and deep that they merit repetitive mental savoring, both through the eyes and the ears.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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A Mixed Bag

This volume contains two of Gibson's most legendary short stories; Johnny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome. It's worth getting for Johnny Mnemonic and a few of the lesser known stories (Red Star, Winter Orbit and New Rose Hotel being personal favorites). Don't get me wrong, the titular story is great, but they should have just done it first. It's not the greatest performance, and it's following some damn tough acts.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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A Collection of Wm Gibson Short Stories

Very good. Some didn’t age well, and the pro-USSR tone of his early works is pretty prominent in some of these stories. They were all interesting though, some were amazing (conceptually), and some show hints, ideas, or influences to his later works after they were fleshed-out and refined. Most obvious is “Burning Chrome” itself, which fits right into the Sprawl trilogy, even using some of the characters from “Count Zero” and “Mona Lisa Overdrive”.

If you are a Gibson fan, especially a Sprawl or Bridge trilogy fan, you should certainly read/listen to these stories.

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    4 out of 5 stars
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Interesting and diverse collection of sci-fi stories

The variety of stories and narrators makes for a breezy listen for when you are in the mood for some entertainment and some thought-provoking content.

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    2 out of 5 stars
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Early classics ruined by terrible readers

Would you try another book from William Gibson and/or the narrators?

William Gibson, always. These narrators, never.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

The narrators are just trying to be cool and failing. Each one speaks in a hard voice, overemphasizing their words. The one good thing you can say for them is they enunciate clearly.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Spotty with flashes of light . . . 😱

5 is very good.
4 is good.
3 is OK.
Ok is what this is. Some themes show promise but ultimately disappoint.
Read it is you're a fan or a completist. 😱

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