Burning Chrome

Burning Chrome is a collection of ten Gibson's short stories, ranging from conventional science fiction to cyberpunk novellas of the "Sprawl" series. Stories include, among others, Johnny Mnemonic, Burning Chrome and Dogfight. 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.

Gibson's screenplay for the Johnny Mnemonic movie was later released as a separate book.

Gibson used the word "cyberspace" first time in the story Burning Chrome.

Stories

Burning Chrome contains following stories :

• Johnny Mnemonic
  1981, originally published in Omni magazine.


• The Gernsback Continuum
  William Gibson's first professional publication, originally published in Universe 11, 1981. Also contained in Mirrorshades. Made into a brief TV film, Tomorrow Calling, 1993.


• Fragments of a Hologram Rose
  William Gibson's first published story in 1977.


• The Belonging Kind (with John Shirley)
  First appeared in Shadows 4, 1981.


• Hinterlands
  Originally published in Omni.


• Red Star, Winter Orbit (with Bruce Sterling)
  Originally published in Omni; also in Mirrorshades.


• New Rose Hotel
  Originally published in Omni.


• The Winter Market
  Originally published in Stardate, 1986.


• Dogfight (with Michael Swanwick)
  Originally published in Omni, 1985.


• Burning Chrome
  originally published in Omni, 1982.

The stories in Burning Chrome were published in various magazines and two were published in the Mirrorshades anthology edited by Bruce Sterling.

Synopsis

Burning Chrome :

Chrome was a streetwise hi-tech whore who cooked up her own custom variation cancers for customers who annoyed her - until somebody got annoyed with her... It might have been in Club Justine, or Jimbo's, or Sad Jacks ot the Rafters; Coretti could never be sure where he'd first seen her. At any time, she might have been in any one of those bars. She swam through the submarine half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of cigarette smoke... she moved through the natural element, one bar after another. Now, Coretti remembered their first meeting as if he saw it through the wrong end of a powerful telescope, small and clear and very far away...