Signed
Burning Chrome
Signed British first edition, 1986
Burning Chrome is William Gibson’s first collection of short fiction and a foundational work of the cyberpunk movement. The ten stories gathered here explore near-future worlds shaped by advanced technology, corporate influence, and the growing integration of human and digital systems. Several of the pieces focus on hackers, data-thieves, and those living at the edges of a rapidly evolving technological landscape. The collection includes “Johnny Mnemonic,” the story that introduced aspects of Gibson’s emerging Sprawl universe and was later adapted into the 1995 film starring Keanu Reeves. The first British edition was preceded by the American edition by about four months.
Signed copy. Signed by Gibson on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, red paper-covered boards, with gilt lettering on spine. London: Gollancz, 1986. ISBN: 0575038462. #10163.
Sliver of page 143/4 folded in a manner suggesting a publishing flaw. Otherwise, about fine in near fine dust jacket that has vertical crease along fold at spine. An extra near fine dust jacket is included with this copy.
Signed copy. Signed by Gibson on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, red paper-covered boards, with gilt lettering on spine. London: Gollancz, 1986. ISBN: 0575038462. #10163.
Sliver of page 143/4 folded in a manner suggesting a publishing flaw. Otherwise, about fine in near fine dust jacket that has vertical crease along fold at spine. An extra near fine dust jacket is included with this copy.
Additional Details
Burning Chrome (1986) collects the ten short stories William Gibson published between 1977 and 1985, and it functions as a kind of laboratory notebook for everything that Neuromancer would crystallize. Four of the stories were written in collaboration, "The Belonging Kind" with John Shirley, "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and "Dogfight" with Bruce Sterling and Michael Swanwick respectively, and the collaborative pieces sit comfortably alongside the solo work without disrupting the collection's coherence.
Bruce Sterling's preface and Gibson's introduction to the 2003 edition, "Source Code," are worth reading alongside the fiction. Sterling positions Gibson as a corrective to the Heinlein tradition, a writer who replaced the technocrat's ivory tower with the street, and whose future is experienced from below rather than managed from above. Gibson's introduction is characteristically oblique, concerned less with explaining the stories than with the strange way imaginary futures age, and with his own formation as a writer through science fiction's odd byways rather than its mainstream.
The earliest stories show Gibson working out the formal and tonal problem of how to write about technology without either celebrating or condemning it. "The Gernsback Continuum" is the most direct statement of this, a story about a photographer haunted by the ghost of a streamlined 1930s future that never happened, its utopian imagery more disturbing than reassuring. "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" is the most experimental, built from fragments rather than narrative, using the structure of the story to make its argument about memory and discontinuity. "Hinterlands," about the psychic cost borne by astronauts who return from encounters with something beyond human comprehension, is the furthest from the Sprawl and arguably the most purely affecting story in the collection.
The Sprawl stories are where the collection's influence has been most felt. "Johnny Mnemonic" introduced the data courier with a cranial implant, the Yakuza, the Lo Teks, and the general atmosphere of technological noir that would define the trilogy. "New Rose Hotel" is perhaps the most compressed, a story about corporate espionage told from the vantage of its own aftermath. "The Winter Market" is the most emotionally complex, following a music producer who helps a terminally ill artist achieve a kind of immortality through recorded experience, and then lives with what that means. The title story, "Burning Chrome," brings two hackers and a woman into a single tight arc of data theft and desire that reads like a proof of concept for everything Gibson was about to do at novel length.
The collection was first published in hardcover by Arbor House in April 1986, with the Gollancz UK edition following in August of the same year. Despite appearing after the novel, it precedes it in terms of the work's composition, and reading it alongside Neuromancer shows Gibson's fictional world arriving more or less fully formed in miniature before it was expanded into something that changed the genre entirely.
Bruce Sterling's preface and Gibson's introduction to the 2003 edition, "Source Code," are worth reading alongside the fiction. Sterling positions Gibson as a corrective to the Heinlein tradition, a writer who replaced the technocrat's ivory tower with the street, and whose future is experienced from below rather than managed from above. Gibson's introduction is characteristically oblique, concerned less with explaining the stories than with the strange way imaginary futures age, and with his own formation as a writer through science fiction's odd byways rather than its mainstream.
The earliest stories show Gibson working out the formal and tonal problem of how to write about technology without either celebrating or condemning it. "The Gernsback Continuum" is the most direct statement of this, a story about a photographer haunted by the ghost of a streamlined 1930s future that never happened, its utopian imagery more disturbing than reassuring. "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" is the most experimental, built from fragments rather than narrative, using the structure of the story to make its argument about memory and discontinuity. "Hinterlands," about the psychic cost borne by astronauts who return from encounters with something beyond human comprehension, is the furthest from the Sprawl and arguably the most purely affecting story in the collection.
The Sprawl stories are where the collection's influence has been most felt. "Johnny Mnemonic" introduced the data courier with a cranial implant, the Yakuza, the Lo Teks, and the general atmosphere of technological noir that would define the trilogy. "New Rose Hotel" is perhaps the most compressed, a story about corporate espionage told from the vantage of its own aftermath. "The Winter Market" is the most emotionally complex, following a music producer who helps a terminally ill artist achieve a kind of immortality through recorded experience, and then lives with what that means. The title story, "Burning Chrome," brings two hackers and a woman into a single tight arc of data theft and desire that reads like a proof of concept for everything Gibson was about to do at novel length.
The collection was first published in hardcover by Arbor House in April 1986, with the Gollancz UK edition following in August of the same year. Despite appearing after the novel, it precedes it in terms of the work's composition, and reading it alongside Neuromancer shows Gibson's fictional world arriving more or less fully formed in miniature before it was expanded into something that changed the genre entirely.
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