"Burning Chrome" by William Gibson (short stories; collected 1986)

**Calling it the greatest cyberpunk writing ever is an understatement to the point of insult.  Calling it one of the best science fiction short story collections is still an understatement.  Simply put, a masterclass in short fiction writing for any genre** 

In the Introduction to the 2003 re-release of this collection, William Gibson wrote about the scifi he read when he was a child:

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.

The less you think your map of the past imaginary (or contingent), the more conventionally you tend to stride forward into your imaginary future.  Many of the authors I read as a boy possessed remarkably solid maps of the past.  Carved, it seemed, from doughty oak.  Confident men, they knew exactly where we were coming from, exactly where we were, and exactly where they thought we were going.  And they were largely wrong on all three counts, at least as seen from this much further up the tracks.

Gibson has always taken the other approach.  At least when it comes to technology and the course of human civilization, he embraces the idea that we don't know what's coming next--or even where we've been and where we are now.  Instead of focusing on the tech, he instead focuses on the people.  No matter how fantastic the world he's writing about, his first priority is filling it with deep, three-dimensional characters that live and breathe and act the way real humans do.  And because of that, his work is, well, it's timeless

Now, obviously Gibson wasn't the first to come up with this idea.  The legendary John W. Campbell--who shaped, or maybe even created, modern science fiction as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine in the "golden age" of the 1930s and 1940s--famously took this stance, saying things like, "I want a story that would be published in a magazine of the twenty-first century."  But I do think Gibson does it better than almost anyone else in the genre

Well, that and he just oozes cool.  Almost a half a century old, and yet he still has lines dripping with swagger and style that would stand out in print today:

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?

So.  With all that said, let's address the elephant in the room.  Yup, Gibson and more or less "invented" cyberpunk with this book, and was hailed as a prophet who basically predicted the internet (this collection is credited with the first use of the term "cyberspace")

What's funny is that Gibson himself has repeatedly said that he wasn't actually trying to predict anything, he thought of the idea of cyberspace as simply a metaphor.  He was less concerned with the possibility of humanity linking its knowledge and data together, and far more concerned with thinking ok what if all of our knowledge and data were linked together . . . what would that be like?  How would it change the world?  How would it change us?

(I'd argue, incidentally, that the real hallmark of cyberpunk is neurological implants, not the internet.  You can have cyberpunk without the internet, but not without some form of humans trying to integrate machines into our brains.  Be it the simstims of Gibson's Sprawl, the musings on languages impact on the brain in Stephenson's "Snow Crash", the tech to integrate man's consciousness to the fighters in Hamilton's "Sonnie's Edge" and the rest of "A Second Chance at Eden", all the tech in "Cyberpunk:  Edgerunners", the list goes on.  Incidentally, this makes Effinger's Budayeen books proto-cyberpunk, arguably just a as significant as "Neuromancer", which has interesting implications on . . . sorry, sorry, sorry.  I got distracted.  That's a whole 'nother TED Talk right there.  I do also tend to like Sterling's definition--"lowlife and high tech"--which is pretty widely accepted.  I agree that it's hard to imagine cyberpunk without some criminal element, or at least some cheerful anarchy.  And actually, that definition is taken from the intro to the first publication of "Burning Chrome" in 1986, brought up as he's describing the story "Dogfight" see look I made it back to the main topic!  Ok, let's continue)

I loved this book, simply put, because Gibson is a master.  From the awesomely cool opening lines of "Johnny Mnemonic" ("I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for:  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") . . . to the pathos of "Hinterlands", a story set in a space station but really just about how hard it is to be alone, how important it is to have someone to support you, and how rare that type of support really is in the cold blackness of this universe ("The first time you see it, Heaven lives up to its name, lush and cool and bright, the long grass dappled with wildflowers.  It helps if you don't know that most of the trees are artificial, or the amount of care required to maintain something like the optimal balance between blue-green algae and diatom algae in the ponds.  Charmian says she expects Bambi to come gamboling out of the woods, and Hiro claims he knows exactly how many Disney engineers were sworn to secrecy under the National Security Act") . . . to the story "Burning Chrome" itself, the title track of this collection, which is as damn-near close to a perfect story as you can get

I feel weird just dumping a massive quote on this blog, but honestly there's no better way to describe a Gibson story than just showing it, especially for his short fiction that is just so full of style.  The most accurate map of the territory is the territory itself.  So I'll throw down at the very end one of my favorite passages from the story "Burning Chrome"

Other scifi short fiction writers spend their whole time showing off their really cool idea.  Some sexy science or whatever concept around which they've built their story.  Gibson doesn't care.  He wrote a story with an idea that literally not only launched an entire subgenre but got him hailed as a technological visionary . . . but here he writes an entire page without every mentioning tech or scifi or anything.  You could throw this passage into a saloon in the Old West or give it to fedora-topped grifters backed by Scott Joplin, and it would still fit.  Because for him, the tech is fun, but the thesis is that people are people, no matter what.  Gibson's philosophy, throughout his entire body of work, can be summed up in four words:  Tech changes, people don't.  The laws will change, but there will always be criminals.  The nature of drugs will change, but there will always be addicts.  People will almost always let you down, but every so often they discover a capacity for altruism that surprises even themselves.  That's why Gibson's work holds up, and will continue to hold up.  He's a master

I loved this book  

I'd known [Bobby] for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities.  And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for.  So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep.

I didn't like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it made it worse.  He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I'd seen it happen a dozen times before.  He might as well have had NEXT printed across his sunglasses in green Day-Glo capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser.

I knew what he did to them.  He turned them into emblems, sigils on the map of his hustler's life, navigation beacons he could follow through a sea of bars and neon.  What else did have to steer by?  He didn't love money, in and of itself, not enough to follow its lights.  He wouldn't work for power over other people; he hated the responsibility it brings.  He had some basic pride in his skill, but that was never enough to keep him pushing.

So he made do with women.

When Rikki showed up, he needed one in the worst way.  He was fading fast, and smart money was already whispering that the edge was off his game.  He needed that one big score, and soon, because he didn't know any other kind of life, and all his clocks were set for hustler's time, calibrated in risk and adrenaline and that supernatural dawn calm that comes when every move's proved right and a sweet lump of someone else's credit clicks into your own account.

It was time for him to make his bundle and get out; so Rikki got set up higher and farther away than any of the others ever had, even though--and I felt like screaming it at him--she was right there alive, totally real, human, hungry, resilient, bored, beautiful, excited, all the things she was . . ."