Burning Chrome

by William Gibson

if poets are the unacknowledged 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.

Good

Science fiction tends to behave like a species of history pointing in the opposite direction, up the timeline rather than back. But you can’t draw imaginary future histories without a map of the past that your readers will accept as their own.

Good

It’s been argued that “the single” (a one-cut vinyl recording in either 78 or 45 rpm format) was the medium that defined the most perfect expressions of rock: that the single is in fact that music’s optimal form. The same has sometimes been said of the short story and science fiction.

Good

the pinball machine, the windup toys of Occupied Japan.

Good

The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners—your

Good

The designers were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.”

Good

Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way.

Good

The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car—no wings for it—and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal. . . .

Good

But they’ve both got jobs and they’re so horny for me to have a career that they can’t piss straight.

Good

the thing they sell in the House of Blue Lights is so popular that it’s almost legal.

Good