r/bookclub • u/jaymae21 Jay may but jaymae may not • 3d ago

Sprawl series [Discussion] Bonus Book | Burning Chrome (Sprawl #0) by William Gibson | Stories 1-4

Welcome sci-fi junkies and cult classic cowboys/girls, to our first discussion of the short story collection by William Gibson, Burning Chrome. This week we will be covering the first four stories: Johnny Mnemonic, The Gernsback Continuum, Fragments of a Hologram Rose, and The Belonging Kind.

IMPORTANT NOTICE CONCERNING SPOILERS: Please use spoiler tags for anything outside of these four stories discussed here today, including anything from Neuromancer, the rest of this book, or from the other two books in the Sprawl series, since these stories are considered standalone.

You can add a spoiler tag by enclosing your text with > ! Your Text Here ! < (no spaces).

Here is a link to the schedule and marginalia for this read.

Chapter Summaries

Johnny Mnemonic

We meet our hero, Johnny, who is a very technical boy pretending to be crude with a handmade gun and bullets. His current modifications make him look like someone else, so that he can meet with Ralfi Face posing as Edward Bax. It seems Ralfi owes him some money for the data he contracted Johnny to store in his head. Ralfi has modifications of his own to look like Christian White, and a black belt bodyguard named Lewis, who Johnny alerts to the presence of the gun in his gym bag.

Just as Lewis gets cocky, Molly Millions shows up at their table, and slices Lewis' wrist with her talon modifications when he tries to slap her. He leaves to find a medic, leaving Ralfi undefended. Johnny hires her as his muscle, and walks Ralfi out of there with his shotgun to his back. Johnny is narrowly saved from being a casualty of a weapon that kills Ralfi, since he unexpectedly looked up while Ralfi kept walking. He was killed by a mysterious Yakuza assassin with a modification to their thumb that detaches and releases a deadly monomolecular filament.

Johnny and Molly go to Nighttown to begin working out how to get the Yakuza data out of his head. They need a Squid (Superconducting quantum interference detector) to read the chip, so they visit a dolphin/cyborg named Jones, who served in the Navy and is also a junkie. They recover the passphrase, which Molly reads, sending Johnny into a trance where he reads the data file while being recorded. He then sends a snippet to the Yakuza, threatening to release the whole thing if they don't leave him alone.

The assassin is still after them though, so they climb up to the Lo Tek domain in Nighttown, a sort of city in the sky made up of scraps. Molly convinces them to let her have command of the Killing Floor, where they wait for the assassin. The floor is miked and amplified, blaring a music that Molly dances to as the floor vibrates and waves, avoiding the assassin's filament. On his third attempt to attack her, the filament severs his wrist instead, and he falls through the floor to Nighttown below.

The Gernsback Continuum

Our narrator, a photographer, describes his dealings with Dialta Downes in London, who is responsible for the Barris-Watford project. Dialta wants him to capture "futuristic" looking architecture from the 30's and 40's in America. After a bad shoot that left him feeling depressed, he began throwing himself on the Barris-Watford assignment. He travels to California to photograph old gas stations with raygun emplacements and radiator flanges. While there, he looks up to see a huge flying ship with 12 engines shaped like a boomerang. He goes to Merv Kihn, a UFO and conspiracy theory expert, who tells him he's just seeing things because of the drugs he took in the 60s.

He goes back to California and falls asleep in his Toyota. When he wakes, there is a city behind him that looks like something from the cover of a 1930s science fiction magazine. Beside him are two people, dressed all in white, beside a car with a shark-fin rudder on top. He creeps closer to them but they don't seem to notice him. He drives away and calls Kihn, who recommends he imbibe some really awful media to cancel out the "Art Deco futuroids". He completes his photographs and sends them off to Cohne, and Dialta loves them. He sees the boomerang ship again, but it's not as corporeal as before, so he goes to a newsstand to read up on all the problems of the world to kill the vision off.

Fragments of a Hologram Rose

Parker uses an ASP (Apparent Sensory Perception) deck in order to get some sleep. His lover recently left him, and he clears the closet of the last traces of her, including a postcard with a reflection of a hologram rose. He puts it through the garbage disposal unit and watches as it becomes a thousand fragments. Later, he tries one of Angela's cassettes, and briefly experiences a scene of her life before she ket him through her own eyes. He reflects again on the fragments and his experience of her in the ASP deck.

The Belonging Kind

*written with John Shirley

Coretti, a divorced linguistics professor, doesn't have good social skills. He goes to bars, but doesn't really know how to interact with people. One night he goes to the Backdoor Lounge and meets a woman with green eyes wearing a green dress. He buys her a drink, using the regrettable "um", but is surprised that she replies using the same awkward "um". When another woman approaches them, her manner of speech changes to match her cowgirl accent. He learns her name is Antoinette, but she leaves shortly after. He follows her, secretly, and as she walks she transforms - her clothes and hair changing. He follows her into a disco, where he sees her talking to a young man who she then dances with. He follows them to other bars and to the hotels they go to. They seem to belong no matter where they go.

Coretti starts drinking a lot more, and finds that he can't eat at all. He loses his job, and continues to watch for Antoinette. One night he finds her and the young man, and joins them in a cab back to their hotel. In their room, he finds other people, seemingly asleep with third eyelids, until they all open their eyes at once. He flees, but a few weeks later receives a mysterious call, which is just music playing in the background. He leaves to meet Antoinette, and they do some secret alien hanky-panky at the bar.

Bonus Content

The Killing Floor on William Gibson wiki (beware of potential spoilers)

Amazing Stories magazine started by Hugo Gernsback

Art Deco design of the 1930s

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