Burning Chrome

“Burning Chrome” is historically notable for containing the first appearance of the term “cyberspace” in Gibson’s fiction and as applied to technology in general. Referring to a “matrix simulator” device, Jack notes “it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the ‘Cyberspace Seven,’ but I’d rebuilt it so many times that you’d have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon” (179). Gibson would later use the term in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, the first installment in the so-called Sprawl trilogy of cyberpunk novels—Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)—which reference several characters from stories in Burning Chrome.

“Burning Chrome” also marks Gibson’s first use of the term “Sprawl” to describe the enormous, rambling cities that form the backdrop of the story’s world. Other stories from the Burning Chrome collection describe near-future settings of a gigantic, densely populated “sprawl of cities and smoke” (185), but the setting is crystalized in “Burning Chrome.”

“Burning Chrome” consolidates many of the cyberpunk threads that wind throughout the story collection, ranging from criminal subcultures and antiheros to the controlling power of technology and the ominous presence of megacorporations. Despite the story’s emphasis on advanced technology, virtual reality devices like the simstim, and the intrigue of sophisticated hacking, the plot of “Burning Chrome” is fairly straightforward and echoes that of “The Winter Market.” It is essentially a story of flawed characters (Bobby and Jack) infatuated with a woman (Rikki) and living with the experience of her loss. Bobby’s and especially Jack’s attempts to work through the very human emotions they experience along with Rikki’s exit from their lives form a stark contrast to the inhuman technology and hacking operations that metaphorically turn the protagonists into “sentient patches of oil swept along down corridors of shadow” (184).

As characters, Bobby and Jack recall the hardboiled protagonists of noir literature, with a combination of cockiness, street smarts, and melancholy. As Jack muses to summarize their personalities: “Bobby’s software and Jack’s hard; Bobby punches console and Jack runs down all the little things that can give you an edge” (181). The exciting, quick pace of the story has Bobby’s and Jack’s criminal activity as a backdrop: At a base level, they are hackers committing a crime when they clean out Chrome’s accounts. However, given that Chrome is a dark character, with connections to organized crime and prostitution, their crime seems to occur on a level playing field with their victim. Moreover, when they donate most of the money to charities and an additional portion to Rikki, in a Robin Hood-like move of stealing from the rich to give to the poor, their motivations appear more ambiguous. This level of ambiguity helps define Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction, which explores not only the interface of humans and technology, but also the blurring of crime, countercultures, and resistance.