Burning Chrome

by William Gibson

nothing acquires quite as rapid or peculiar a patina of age as an imaginary future.

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.

Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, Robert Sheckley (to name only three, but very fine, examples) all did this for me, whereas Heinlein and Asimov didn’t.

“My kind of man,” she said, and laughed. “What’s in the bag?” “A shotgun.” “Crude.” It might have been a compliment.

We’re an information economy. They teach you that in 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 . . .

After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels.

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

It is possible to photograph what isn’t there; it’s damned hard to do, and consequently a very marketable talent.

Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s just no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil, if she hadn’t been brought up on The Bionic Man and all those Star Trek reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she knows that it happened to her.

“If you want a classier explanation, I’d say you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties’ comic art. They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.

Holography went too, and the block-wide Fuller domes that had been the holo temples of Parker’s childhood became multilevel supermarkets, or housed dusty amusement arcades where you still might find the old consoles, under faded neon pulsing APPARENT SENSORY PERCEPTION through a blue haze of cigarette smoke.

The French call it le métro, the subway, and the Russians call it the river, but subway won’t carry the distance, and river, for Americans, can’t carry quite the same loneliness.

Olga’s seashell generated an entire subbranch of the science, devoted exclusively to the study of . . . Olga’s seashell.

She has the kind of Texas accent that makes ice sound like ass.

Shaking for different futures and better pasts.

Our room had a single window, high and narrow, where I stood and watched the rain fur the river with silver needles.

What he’s the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk.

There was coffee. Life would go on.

did one of those things you do and never find out why, even though something in you knows you could never have done anything else.

push-me-pull-you

He did it with the tight grace of a kid slamming change into an arcade game, sure of winning and ready to pull down a string of free games.

bobby was a cowboy, and ice was the nature of his game, ice from ICE, Intrusion Counter-measures Electronics.

It’s just like voodoo in a nightfight.”