This migration, from the suburbs to remote Appalachia, seemed transformative. Gibson’s mother, Otey, took him to Wytheville, Virginia, where she’d grown up. His father, William Ford Gibson, managed construction projects and died early in Gibson’s life, when he was seven. Gibson was born in 1948, in South Carolina. It’s from an extensive profile of William Gibson in the New Yorker, by Joshua Rothman, written in 2019, that I draw a deeper context on the man behind the writing. Let’s start this journey with a little background on William Gibson. I’ll be with you every step of the way as we dive into the unearthly other world of cyberpunk. To make sense of it without overloading ourselves, let’s take this in two parts, exploring “Burning Chrome” today and in a later exploration “Neuromancer.” There’s too much going to do them both at once.īut take heart. There’s a lot to uncover here, including the interesting evolution of William Gibson’s life in the context of his writing. Then, “Neuromancer,” his landmark cyberpunk novel published in 1984.

There’s two pieces of work that are especially of interest, Gibson’s early collection of stories, entitled “Burning Chrome,” parts of which were published in 1981. Gibson, considered the author who brought the cyberpunk genre to life, is both an influential landmark on the map of cyberpunk, but also an odd one, with his obsessions, not just with high-tech themes, but with what seems the more traditional fixations heros, anti-heros and relationships. Nowhere is that more apparent than the neon soaked works of William Gibson. You’ve given us influential views of the positive, and often the negative impacts of technology. Cyberpunk, how you’ve reshaped our vision of our own technologically enriched lives.

Burning chrome by william gibson