★★★★☆ Introducing Molly and the Sprawl

Burning Chrome

William Gibson

It was around 1986 when I picked up William Gibson's Count Zero in an airport bookstore. After gobbling it down on the flight, I grabbed everything by Gibson I could get my hands on. There wasn't much. Of course Neuromancer was next. Mona Lisa Overdrive would not come out for another two years, thus the small collection Burning Chrome was my third Gibson book. Burning Chrome contains ten stories, seven by Gibson and three collaborations with other cyperpunk authors. I remember finding the collabs inferior.

At this remove I really only remember two of the ten stories: "Johnny Mnemonic" and the title story "Burning Chrome". These two stories are the clearest precursors of the Cyberspace trilogy. "Johnny Mnemonic" is my favorite, because it introduces razorgirl Molly Millions (AKA Sally Shears), my favorite character from the Cyberspace novels. The real end of the story of Molly and Johnny is not told here -- you'll find it in Neuromancer.

If any of the characters of "Burning Chrome" show up in the Cyberspace novels, I didn't notice it. However, it introduces Cyberspace, the shared consensual hallucination in which much of the action of the novels takes place, and an arguably prophetic vision of the thing that would eventually be called the World-Wide-Web, a term not much used anymore, but it's what people mostly mean when they say "the Internet" or "the Net".

They're good stories.

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