47 pages • 1 hour read
William GibsonBurning Chrome
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 3 Summary: “Fragments of a Hologram Rose”
Parker lives in a city in near-future America, which is controlled by megacorporations. In his youth, his parents signed him up to be indentured to a Japanese-American plastics company. After working there for a time, he escaped. Parker winds up in a makeshift but heavily guarded camp. He is unable to escape the tightly guarded camp until he finds some cocaine and valuable antibiotics in the jacket of a dead woman and bribes the guards to let him through.
While waiting to be escorted out, Parker makes his first visit to an apparent sensory perception (ASP) machine. These cassette-driven devices allow users to relive memories by entering a so-called delta state through virtual-reality interfaces. They have become prevalent, first as theater locations and later as portable devices.
After leaving the camp, Parker developed a relationship with a woman named Angela who “had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP” (44). Angela has left him, however, and Parker spends his time revisiting memories using his Sendai Sleep-Master portable ASP machine. He has become addicted to the device and has difficulty sleeping unless he uses it. Compounding his problems, the power grid is taxed, and brownouts are frequent. Parker’s ASP machine is also in poor shape and is held together with tape.
Getting up from one of his VR sessions, Parker sees a few of Angela’s belongings: a sandal strap, an ASP cassette, and a hologram rose. He feeds the sandal strap and hologram through the garbage disposal and watches as the hologram rose “is shredded into a thousand fragments” (40). He keeps the cassette of Angela and puts it into his ASP device. Afterwards, he lies awake thinking of her and the fragments of the rose. He feels himself to be on the brink of a personal epiphany, realizing about the hologram that “each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle” (44), but before he can reflect on the significance of that thought, he falls back into the delta state.
Story 3 Analysis
Gibson’s first published story, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” exemplifies motifs found throughout Burning Chrome, including technology that proves dangerous to disaffected characters. The ASP machines depicted in the story may not be inherently dangerous—on the surface, they simply offer a way to relive memories—but in the hands of someone like Parker, ASP technology proves to be powerfully addictive, so much so that it disrupts his everyday life: He “hadn’t been able to sleep without an inducer,” his Ono-Sendai Sleep-Master, “for two years” (37).
The Sleep-Master in “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” implies Gibson’s critique of technology and consumerism. As it is a consumer product marketed for entertainment, users of the Sleep-Master would imagine themselves to be in control of the device. However, Parker’s addiction to his ASP machine shows this to be an illusion. The situation is inverted, and the machine controls him, making the product name ironically accurate: The device is the master of his ability to sleep.
On a broader level, the story implies that escapist consumerism gives people the illusion of control when in reality they are controlled. The extent to which corporations have power in the world of “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” is signaled in the sections of the story that mention Parker’s experience of being indentured to a plastics company. Society beyond the realm of such corporations can be equally controlling; Parker has difficulty leaving the camp he winds up in after escaping from the plastics company.
The virtual-reality-like devices do require some imagination to use, providing a limited opportunity for ASP users to determine their experience. In general, however, users’ ability to utilize imagination is waning; “broadcast ASP stars have becomes increasingly androgynous” because many “users are unable to comfortably assimilate the subjective body picture of the opposite sex” (40). Thus, while there is a slight push-and-pull between creativity and control in “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” the power of corporate technology is the clear victor. The end of the story emphasizes this when Parker falls back into the mind-numbing delta state just as he seemed on the verge of coming to a personally meaningful revelation. As the story closes and his near-epiphany evaporates, this loss echoes Parker’s lack of self-agency.
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By William Gibson
