The most noticeable thing about William Gibson’s future as seen in his 1986 short story collection Burning Chrome is just how relentlessly shiny it is. Just like the classics of 1930s Science Fiction he pretends to disdain, even the dark underbelly of his future is full of “Gee, whiz!” artifacts that take the observer’s breath away. Or did once, at least. The breathless observers of ’30s SF have no more breath to take.
And we who were once oh-so-bright-eyed youngsters all agog at the future Gibson crafted for us, we can now regard the shiny future he made and look askance, embarrassed by those long-ago reveries on the world to come, embarrassed by those visions we now see in their naiveté as just as puerile, just as cringeworthy as the stories of E.E. “Doc” Smith or Capt. S.P. Meek.
For these stories, the progenitors of the ‘cyberpunk’ subgenre, have not aged well, not well at all. The shining “Gee, whiz!” chrome is a bug, not a feature. At times Gibson is too poetic for his own good, groping towards a gritty, hard-boiled, voice of the streets diction that is undercut by the marvels of the world-soon-to-come. He is beguiled by the cyber, but it is difficult to write shiny noir. Of course, that luminous quality to everything he sees could just be the drubs. There are a lot of drugs.
Funnily enough, Gibson detested the very sins I here accuse him of, as in “The Gernsback Continuum”, included in Burning Chrome (and anthologized as well in the seminal collection Mirrorshades). A photographer is plagued by visions of the impossibly bright populist future as promoted by the science fiction pulps of an earlier age. Gibson shows his strong poetic talent here in the quite sage words of the protagonist’s friend Kihn, who advises him that the best cure for his backwards looking futuristic hallucinations is to watch TV and porn, because “Really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts.” This is true insight.* But Gibson’s diss of utopia is often undercut by his own wide-eyed wonder at the technological “pocket full of mumbles” that the miracles of computers and biotechnology will bring. And again, there’s also the drugs.
Like an aging Gen Xer who never recovered from his heavy bets on Pets.com and its sock puppet, William Gibson focused on the unimportant things and just plain guessed wrong. Though these failings are almost essential to science fiction, Gibson’s future has fusted faster than need be, and at times these early stories make difficult rereading over thirty years later as the discordant notes overpower the main themes. Writing about the near future is hard. John Varley also wrote about a future when elective body modification becomes commonplace, but his stores hold up much better than Gibson’s to some extent because they are set at a greater remove in time (and space), though social mores have changed so that much of Varley’s oeuvre now seems simply creepy.
But Gibson was merely repeating what all the trendy world wanted to believe of the coming tech revolution; no one foresaw the boring, deadening reality to come. Break out the old issues of Mondo 2000† and read of the coming “smart drugs” that will release the other 90% of our brains, and all the rest. But the bad guesses in Burning Chrome pile up quickly. Among the dominance of the Japanese zaibatsu, transdermal interfaces for microcomputers, the trade in black market RAM and endocrines, the replacement of eyes with manufactured lenses and orbs, among all these his lyrical if not maudlin stories of love tormented or denied at times get lost.
Of course, it is too easy to second guess these choices now, looking back from the ruins of the future we actually got, as opposed to the ruins we were promised. But his vision is often fascinated by the packaging and not the product. It is as if the current Stonertopia were described back in the 1970s, and reams of prose were devoted to the amazing rolling papers used by the dopesmoking elite, handcrafted from rare Southeast Asian woods, etc., yet missing the fact that modern weed would incapacitate most riders on Kesey’s bus for longer than it would have taken them to arrange bail on felony drug charges. I mean, I love both versions of “Johnny Mnemonic”, and the prose holds up better than the movie for me, but—sheesh! Why in the world smuggle data around in living human brains?!? Sure, I get it, when you are feeding fourteen floppy disks one after another into your 512K Macintosh to install some new software it may occur to you that the human brain has a lot of storage. However, if you can conceive of replacement eyeballs that also record video you can think of miniaturizing data storage as well. And what possible purpose could be served, in the short story from which this collection gets its name, could be served by placing a “plug-in military program” into a physical container that “looked like the magazine of a small assault rifle”? The software in question supposedly excels in breaking into secure computer systems, but if a device has no basic I/O, just how will it be ported into the target system? I began to believe that Gibson was ignorant of the ‘soft’ part of software. He writes of cracking this program as a eight-hour job, three hours of which are spent just opening the magazine-like case (with lasers, no less!). These and other groaners made me doubt that Neuromancer could have held together as well as I remembered.‡
Perhaps the issues I see were merely the early experiments of a budding novelist, for that seems to be Gibson’s forte. Looking at Burning Chrome more like Pynchon’s Slow Learner palliates the most egregious faults. Or perhaps Gibson is at his best as a collaborator, as in two of the three stories in this collection he co-wrote with others. (Hey, my favorite SF author whose initials are not PKD is C.M. Kornbluth, and more than half his output was as part of a writing duo.) Perhaps Canada must take the blame, as it so often does. Or perhaps it’s the drugs. Yes. Probably the drugs.
* Unfortunately, in the After Age we live in, the advice is untenable, as our nightmares are bad media made even worse reality.
† Unfortunately, I don’t have issue #11.
‡ I started rereading Neuromancer right after I finished Burning Chrome; so far, it’s as good as I recalled.