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Review
‘A fistful of fast, challenging, hot-wired short stories’
New Musical Express
‘Furiously inventive, brilliantly written, the cutting edge of sf’
Guardian
‘Some subversives are still at work proving that SF can pack its strongest blows into its shortest works… He’s at his best dealing with the victims of the new, the people burnt out by drugs, computers, huge corporations or the strangeness of space’
Fiction Magazine
‘At once a lament and a critique, these stories show the way SF is being rewired. Gibson, his finger jitteringly on the fast-forward button, shows the direction in which our literature might be headed’
The Times
Product Description
Ten brilliant, seminal, hard-edged, nerve-enhancing stories from the most influential science fiction writer of our time.
Ten brilliant, seminal, hard-edged, nerve-enhancing stories from the most influential science fiction writer of our time. Since they were first published in the 1980s, Gibson’s vision has become a touchstone – his lapidary prose seethes with buzz-phrases newly minted yet destined to be current well in to the future.
Lowlife characters, ghosts and hallucinations haunt the malls and plazas of an intensely realized holographic world, a name-brand society, with cloned Ninja bodyguards, retro fashions, stunning ideas.
Gibson in the year 2000 is the unchallenged guru, prophet and voice of the new cybernetic world order and virtual reality.
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The book reviewed here is a collection of ten short stories, including his first published story Fragments of a Hologram Rose from 1977.
Gibson's style has been described as "a combination of low-life and high-tech". This collection shows how perceptive he can be in observing both. Gibson doesn't just use technology as a back-drop or to provide props; he considers the effects that developments in technology might have upon individuals and societies. In Johnny Mnemonic for example a character explains:--
"We're an information economy. They teach you that at school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified."
Gibson describes also the detail of low-life settings. In this collection there are very good descriptions of different types of bars in The Belonging Kind. He paints portraits of different characters, Deke in Dogfight, Lese in The Winter Market, with different colours and shades.
Ultimately, however, he extrapolates from a mass (or media) consciousness of the present. Gibson has interesting things to say but he is not a prophet. The future will not be the same as his stories. The Soviet Union has not dominated space research (as in Red Star, Winter Orbit), in fact it no longer exists. Many future developments will derive not from mass actions or popular consciousness, but from the work of "outsiders". Instead of looking just at what is now considered "central", perhaps he should view what is emerging at the edge....
Gibson writes hard, technical cyber-punk SF with the art of a real master of the short story genre. Good SF shorts are of course all about ideas, situations and snappy plot twists but great examples of this genre also pack in characters that you can understand and root for and worlds that come to life in your head. It is hard to do that and only a handful of writers can turn out work of this quality.
The opening shot in the book, "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those rare tales that burns its way into your head. Reading it is almost like being there watching the events unfold. The narrative makes the outlandish grunge-tech future come to life and it is easy to see how this tale inspired the making of a movie.
It is a powerful start and the rest of the book does not disappoint. From the anonymous barfly world of "The Belonging Kind", up into the dying orbit of an old Russian space station in "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and back to the seedy hacker world of "Burning Chrome" Gibson delivers a set of tales for which the phrase "assault on the senses" is no exaggeration.
The book is a fine introduction to both Gibson and the cyber-punk genre and it is a book that every SF fan should own and re-read regularly. If you like it and to want to explore similar work, I'd suggest "A Good Old Fashioned Future" by Bruce Sterling, or the "Mirrorshades" anthology.
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