"Burning Chrome" by William Gibson (Gollanz, 2016)

First published in 1986, this story collection includes 3 collaborations. "Gibson is the Raymond Chandler of SF", according to the Observer on the back cover.

"Johnny Mnemonic" is crammed with ideas and atmosphere. In "The Belonging Kind" Coretti's an outsider - "Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer" (p.49). He's stalking another outsider, a women, who seems to change. The trek from bar to bar reminds me of John Cheever's "The Swimmer". Is she an alien? I liked much of "Hinterlands". "The Winter Market" held my attention - "Trash fires gutter in steel canisters around the Market. The snow still falls and kids huddle over the flames like arthritic crows, hopping from foot to foot, wind whipping their dark coats. Up in Fairview's arty slum-tumble, someone's laundry has frozen solid on the line, pink squares of bedsheets standing out against the background dinge and the confusion of satellite dishes and solar panels. Some ecologist's eggbeater windmill goes round and round, round and round, giving a whirling finger to the Hydro rates."

"Burning Chrome" is set in a world I'm familiar with from his novels - icebreakers and black ice. "Somewhere we have bodies, very far away, in a crowded loft roofed with steel and glass. Somewhere we have microseconds, maybe time left to pull out. We've crashed her gates disguised as an audit and three subpoenas".

Other reviews

• Adi Robertson
• Ted Gioia
• Nader Elhefnawy (Gibson's storytelling can be as muddled as his prose style can be dazzling, the strength of his plotting and descriptions of the action inconsistent for all of the flash of a single word choice or sentence ... "Continuum" works well, in part, because it is rooted in Gibson's strengths (his eye for detail, his strong sensibility about past, present and future) rather than his weaknesses (like his plotting) ... "The Winter Market" requires Casey to get inside Leni in the most literal, technological terms, as Gibson only rarely does in his focus on surface detail. The result here is not only one of Gibson's best composed stories, but perhaps the most resonant expression of the loneliness and alienation of the future he describes in the entire collection.)