Burning Chrome

by William Gibson

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. In the case of rock, I’m inclined to suspect nostalgia for a dead media platform. In the case of science fiction, I think there may be something to it. It requires a very peculiar sort of literary musculature to write a very short piece of science fiction that really works.

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 crude-ness.

I felt like a punk who’d gone out to buy a switchblade and come home with a small neutron bomb. Screwed again, I thought. What good’s a neutron bomb in a streetfight?