Highlights from Burning Chrome by William Gibson Last read on June 19, 2022
Highlights from this book
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If poetas are the unacknowledges legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the graish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.
And SF writers have every opportunity to kick up our heels -- we have influence without responsibility. Very few feel obliged to take us seriously, yet out ideas permeate the culture, bubbling along invisibly, like background radiation.
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Gibson's extrapolative techniques are those of classic hard SF, but his demonstration of them is pure New-Wave. Rather than the usual passionless techies and rock-ribbed Competent Men of hard SF, his characters are a pirate's crew of losers, hustlers, spin-offs, castoffs, and lunatics. We see his future from the belly up, as if it is lived, not merely as dry speculation.
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If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I'd had to turn both those twelve-guage shells from brass stock, on lathe, and then load them myself; I'd had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand loading cartridges; I'd had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers -- all very tricky. But I knew they'd work.
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The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single matascrawl of rage and frustration.
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I held the useless shotgun under my jacket. Its hardness and heft were comforting, even though I had no more shells. And it came ot me that I had no idea all of what was really happening, or of what was supposed to happen. And that was the nature of my game, because I'd spent most of my life as a blind receptacle to be filled with other people's knowledge and then drained, spouting synthetic languages I'd never understand. A very technical boy. Sure.
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I decided to stay up here. When I looked out across the Killing Floor, before he came, I saw how hollow I was. And I knew I was sick of being a bucket. So now I climb down and visit Jones, almost every night.
We're partners now, Jones and I, and Molly Millions, too. Molly handles our business in the Drome. Jones is still in Funland, but he has a bigger tank, with fresh seawater trucked in once a week. And he has his junk, when he needs it. He still talks to the kids with his frame of lights, but he talks to me on a new display unit in a shed that I rent there, a better unit than the one he used in the navy.
And we're all making good money, better money than I made before, because Jone's Squid can read the traces of anything that anyone ever stored in me, and he gives it to me on the display unit in languages I can understand. So we're learning a lot about all my former clients. And one day I'll have a surgeon dig all the silicon out of my amygdalae, and I'll live with my own memories and nobody else's, the way other people do. But not for a while.
In the meantime it's really okay up here, way up in the dark, smoking a Chinese filter tip and listening to the condensation that drips from the geodesics. Real quiet up here -- unless a pair of Lo Teks decide to dance on the Killing Floor.
It's educational, too. With Jones to help me figure things out, I'm getting to be the most technical boy in town.
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The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future.
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I decided to go to sleep, with nothing worse to worry about than rattle-snakes and cannibal hippies, safe amid the friendly roadside garbage of my own familiar continuum. In the morning I’d drive down to Nogales and photograph the old brothels, something I’d intended to do for years. The diet pill had given up.
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They were the children of Dialta Downes’s ‘80-that-wasn’t; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world.
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Quit yelling and listen to me. I’m letting you in on a trade secret: Really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts. If it keeps the saucer people off my back, it can keep these Art Deco futuroids off yours. Try it. What have you got to lose?
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Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know stolen credit cards a burned-out suburb planetary conjunctions of a stranger a tank burning on a highway a flat packet of drugs a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
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If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift in the paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg tradition of a pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this newer technology, with his promise of discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction of the full range of sensory perception?
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Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know stolen credit cards a burned-out suburb planetary conjunctions of a stranger a tank burning on a highway a flat packet of drugs a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
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Coretti had never been in a disco before; he found himself in an environment designed for complete satisfaction-in-distraction. He waded nervously through the motion and the fashions and the mechanical urban chants booming from the huge speakers. He sought her almost blindly on the pose-clotted dance floor, amid strobe lights.
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And for the first time, Coretti knew what they were, what they must be. They were the kind you see in bars who seem to have grown there, who seem genuinely at home there. Not drunks, but human fixtures. Functions of the bar. The belonging kind.
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Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.
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Even now, knowing what I know, I still want to go. I never will. But we can swing here in this dark that towers way above us, Charmian’s hand in mind. Between our palms the drug’s torn foil wrapper. And Saint Olga smiles out at us from the walls; you can feel her, all those prints from the same publicity shot, torn and taped across the walls of night, her white smile, forever.
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Tell them . . . and every cliche came rushing to him with an absolute rightness that made him want to laugh hysterically: One small step . . . We came in peace . . . Workers of the world.... You must tell them that I need it, he said, pinching his shrunken wrist, in my very bones.
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“But why?" Korolev shook his head, deeply con-fused. "Why have you come?" "We told you. To live here. We can enlarge this thing, maybe build more. They said we’d never make it living in the balloons, but we were the only ones who could make them work. It was our one chance to get out here on our own. Who’d want to live out here for the sake of some government, some army brass, a bunch of pen pushers? You have to want a frontier want it in your bones, right?" Korolev smiled. Andy grinned back. "We grabbed those power cables and just pulled ourselves straight up. And when you get to the top, well, man, you either make that big jump or else you rot there." His voice rose. "And you don’t look back, no sir! We’ve made that jump, and we’re here to stay!”
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“It rains a lot, up here; there are winter days when it doesn’t really get light at all, only a bright, indeterinmate gray. But then there are days when it’s like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sun-lit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God’s own movie. It was like that the day her agents phoned, from deep in the heart of their mirrored pyramid on Beverly Boulevard, to tell me she’d merged with the net, crossed over for good, that Kings of Sleep was going triple-platinum. I’d edited most of Kings, done the brain-map work and gone over it all with the fast-wipe module, so I was in line for a share of royalties.”
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“ It was one of those nights, I quickly decided, when you slip into an alternate continuum, a city that looks exactly like the one where you live, except for the peculiar difference that it contains not one person you love or know or have even spoken to before. Nights like that, you can go into a familiar bar and find that the staff has just been replaced; then you understand that your real motive in going there was simply to see a familiar face, on a waitress or a bartender, whoever . . . This sort of thing has been known to mediate against partytime.”
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It was hot, the night we burned Chrome. Out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Bobby’s loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LEDs on the face of the matrix simulator.
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Bobby read his future in women; his girls were omens, changes in the weather, and he’d sit all night in the Gentleman Loser, waiting for the season to lay a new face down in front of him like a card.
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When Rikki showed up, he needed one in the worst way. He was fading fast, and smart money was already whispering that the edge was off his game. He needed that one big score, and soon, because he didn’t know any other kind of life, and all his clocks were set for hustler’s time, calibrated in risk and adrenaline and that supernal dawn calm that comes when every move’s proved right and a sweet lump of someone else’s credit clicks into your own account.
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But I guess she cashed the return fare, or else didn’t need it, because she hasn’t come back. And sometimes late at night I’ll pass a window with posters of simstim stars, all those beautiful, identical eyes staring back at me out of faces that are nearly as identical, and sometimes the eyes are hers, but none of the faces are, none of them ever are, and I see her far out on the edge of all this sprawl of night and cities, and then she waves goodbye.