Gibson coined the word “cyberspace” in this text and laid the groundwork for his Sprawl trilogy starting with Neuromancer (review).

Review: Together with Johnny Mnemonic ( review), this novelette provided the booster detonation for the baby subgenre Cyberpunk back in 1982. Jack acquires a Russian military “icebreaker” program from a fence which he’s going to use to penetrate Chrome’s security system, thereby “Burning Chrome”. They said a lot of things about Chrome, none of them at all reassuring. They said she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you. Chrome is said to use even “Black ICE”, capable of killing the intruder.Ĭhrome: her pretty child face smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home on the bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, cold gray eyes that lived under terrible pressure. Rikki wants to get famous in the hollywood scene and longs for one of those luxurious Zeiss Ikon Eyes, replacing her own eyes with those cyborgish mirrorshades.īoth want to break into big time criminal Chrome’s bank account which is protected by expensive “Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics” (ICE) security programs. Bobby is quite a womanizer who wants to impress his new flame Rikki. Synopsis: Narrator “Automatic Jack” is a hardware nerd who forms a hacker team with software specialist Bobby Quine.

I knew every chip in Bobby’s simulator by heart it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the “ Cyberspace Seven,” but I’d rebuilt it so many time that you’d have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon. Out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Bobby’s loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LEDs on the face of the matrix simulator.

The burning chrome