Critics discussing William Gibson's fiction generally focus on his novels—Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1987)—and devote only brief mentions or book reviews to the material in his 1986 collection Burning Chrome. Even when the short stories are discussed, they are treated either as insignificant exercises that led up to the novels or as works that have no existence independent of them.¹ Even Gregory Feeley—the author of one of the collection's more substantial reviews—gives little attention to the legitimate literary substance of the collection. Instead he focuses on the “immaturity of the attitudes” (p. 97) that lies beneath all of Gibson's fiction. In fact, despite the marked similarities between several of his short stories and novels, Gibson's short fiction clearly indicates his authorial range and depth. By carefully examining several important stories, I hope to show that Gibson's short fiction is neither stereotypical nor immature.

Some broad critiques of Gibson's work apply to his short stories, while other charges directed specifically at his short stories are neither accurate nor pertinent. It is the purpose of this paper to differentiate between the accurate, useful critiques of Gibson's short stories and those that are either inaccurate or misleading. For instance, charges of occasional stylistic excess (Feeley, p. 98; Rirdan, p. 44) are relevant. Gibson does tend, as Feeley phrases it, to “strain for effect with technicolor dramatics” (p. 98). On the other hand, the observation that commercial considerations adversely affected Burning Chrome (Feeley, p. 97)—although factually accurate—tends to obscure rather than illuminate more substantial issues relevant to the short stories. The collection includes all the short fiction Gibson had written or collaborated upon up until the time of its publication due to the prevailing economics of the publishing business—interesting, perhaps, but not a factor of great importance to the evaluation of the works themselves. The publishers noted a demand for Gibson's work and provided a collection as quickly as they could.

Because Burning Chrome collects the work of a relatively new author, it is necessarily brief and, as we could expect, contains some tentative, early efforts. The tendency among Gibson commentators toward unified critical treatment of the novels and short stories, however, presents more overarching problems. In light of the parallels in style, setting, and characters between the novels and the short stories, one can understand the inclination toward grouping Gibson's works together and treating them as a unified whole. But the existence of such parallels does not require that we treat all of Gibson's short stories as being cut from the same cloth as his novels. Critics have dwelt on Gibson's tendencies for so long that the importance—and even the existence—of his fictive variations have been largely overlooked.

Gibson puts his characteristic style and approach to considerably different use in two stories—“Hinterlands” and “The Winter Market”. Yet unlike “The Gernsback Continuum”, which is so markedly different from Gibson's other work that generalisations cannot meaningfully apply to it, these stories are discussed in broad sweeps because they outwardly resemble the Gibson norm. In these works, though, Gibson undertakes literary experiments very different from his outwardly adventure-orientated works while still using many elements both of the hard-boiled thriller and what has been termed cyberpunk.² By noting the ways these works deviate from what critics have posited as Gibson's norm, we can both determine the nature of Gibson's literary talent and better understand his work.

Gibson's stories generally open in the midst of situations that the reader cannot help but find disorienting. Only after a gradual accumulation of details do the initially confusing and apparently unrelated elements of the story coalesce into an identifiable pattern. The other norm of Gibson's fiction, as both Orson Scott Card and Tom Maddox observe, is a reliance on the traditions of hard-boiled fiction: his dialogue and writing style are often terse; violence is presented at close range; the settings are gritty; and the protagonist is usually a cynical figure in a necessarily cynical world. The briefest and most representative example of Gibson's brand of hard-boiled science fiction is “Johnny Mnemonic”, which includes all the standard elements of the hard-boiled tradition in a context quite different from anything Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler were likely to have imagined.

But while Gibson constantly relies on the disconcerting opening in his fiction, he both modifies and puts the hard-boiled tradition to considerably different use in “Hinterlands” and “The Winter Market”. Here, Gibson sets aside high-technology action-adventure in favour of the character study. In both cases, the tone is contemplative, and Gibson moves much closer to the literary roots of hard-boiled, aligning his work with the fiction of Hemingway and Dos Passos rather than with the sensational stories of Mickey Spillane. Once the reader has moved past the initially confusing openings of “Hinterlands” and “The Winter Market” and begun synthesising complete pictures of the stories, they unfold in a multiplicity of directions, and details that at first appear irrelevant or confusing take on new significance. The avenue of exploration I will pursue is one which is central to Gibson's fiction—his treatment of technology's effects on human psychology.

“Hinterlands” chronicles a day in the life of Toby Halpert, a “surrogate”. With the help of a “handler”, he tries to prevent the psychologically destroyed space travellers returning home from the area known as the Tovyevski Anomaly—and generally referred to as the “Highway”—from killing themselves. At the same time, the handler-surrogate teams try to learn as much as possible from these travellers—called hitchhikers—about what happens between the time they disappear into the Highway and return bearing artifacts from alien cultures. The suicide rate among surviving hitchhikers is one hundred per cent, and the work the surrogates do is demanding, stressful and disillusioning, but it benefits society by maximising the amount of useful information obtained from each hitchhiker. Given its subject matter, one may first be tempted to categorise “Hinterlands” as an other story that turns, as Feeley puts it, on the trite, overused literary device of “monstrous truths that drive their discoverers mad” (p. 98); however, such a categorisation overlooks Gibson's careful creation of a psychologically complex character, Halpert, who is neither a type nor simply another of Gibson's characters whose catharsis is “largely banal” (Feeley, p. 97).

Considering Halpert's decision to remain in such a stressful environment, his psychology is, if nothing else, intriguing. Similarly, his suffering, his sacrifice of individual identity in the course of his work, and his radical discontent and disconnectedness from society are, even is sometimes overstated, far from banal. The intensity of his experiences and his desire to be a hitchhiker—even though he has full knowledge of the job's dangers—are extreme, and the reader might question his sanity, but his profession, his feelings, and his conjectures combine to form a picture of a character who is far from stereotypical. The story provides more than the circumstances of an alien and unfamiliar situation; it provides a picture of the Tovyevski Anomaly and a life lived in that phenomenon's shadow.

If the plot device of truths that drive their discoverers mad were at the root of the story, Feeley would be on firmer ground in his criticism of “Hinterlands”. But it is not. The plot element Feeley finds objectionable is not a firmly, objectively established “fact” of the story; Halpert simply speculates that Olga Tovyevski's, Leni Hofmannstahl's, and every other hitchhiker's insanity results from the transactions they undertake to gain alien technologies and artifacts. Yet Halpert has no more idea that the reader what actually happens to the hitchhikers or why they invariably go insane. As he states about Hofmannstahl: “We'll probably never know what she met out there” (p. 85).

A specific cause for the hitchhikers' insanity is neither provided by the story, nor, finally, important to the way it functions. The reader is necessarily left without any way of knowing whether Halpert's hypothesis is correct because his uncertainty provides the tension that shapes his character and drives the story. Gibson presents Halpert as unstable, as a character who has attempted suicide, still wants to try his luck at the highway, and abuses drugs. Consequently, his more subjective leaps of imagination—such as his theory about the cause of hitchhiker suicides—need to be taken as such. After all, despite speculating that: “Olga must have know, must have seen it all, somehow; she was trying to keep us from finding our way out there” (p. 86), she might just as easily have been “clawing at her radio gear, bloodying her hands” (p. 82) in a frantic attempt to call for help or alert earth of some discovery. In the end, Toby's supposition about Olga and her radio gear works more as a projection of his own feelings about the Highway than a literal account of what happened on Olga's ship. Whether she was attempting to destroy the radio equipment, engaging in some insane struggle to make it work, or doing something entirely different, from Halpert's point of view, what Olga ought to have been doing was trying to destroy it. As a result, all the possibilities condense into one, and Olga's actions are viewed through the lens of Halpert's own desperation and anxiety about the Highway. Gibson does not reuse a tired literary device in “Hinterlands”; he examines a complex character under exceptional pressure.

A similar misdirection of critical interest undermines commentary on the “Winter Market”. Critics focus on the fact that one of its characters creates art from junk (Feeley, p. 98: Maddox, p. 47) not because that creation is the story's major concern, but, rather, because this aspect of the story allows them either to draw parallels between “The Winter Market” and Gibson's novels, as both Maddox and Feeley do, or to criticise Gibson on the grounds of unoriginality and banality, as Feeley does. In either case, this aspect of the story—although significant—is subsidiary to the story's rendering of the relationship between Casey, an engineer, and Lise, a woman who, although dying and confined to life in an exoskeleton, is “born to” (p. 139) the popular artistic form of her day. Her goal, though, is not to become famous or wealthy, but to free herself of a congenitally diseased body by having her personality encoded as a computer programme and stored in a mainframe. Thus, even after Lise's death, her programme is still capable of’phoning Casey. Casey's anxiety about hearing her voice again and his difficulty in reconciling the reality of her physical death with her continued existence in a computer's memory drive the story and form a constant narrative refrain, represented by repeated mentions that Lise might call Casey or by Casey's questions about whether or not the computer programme is actually the same Lise he knew. Both the story's bleak tone and its complex ambiguities are captured effectively in the first of these refrains, when Casey stands on a wall above False Creek, apparently toying with the idea of jumping. He says: “I stood there a long time before I took that first step back. Because she was dead, and I'd let her get that way. And because I knew she'd’phone me, in the morning” (p. 126).

This complex web of considerations and reflections and their effect on Casey are central to “The Winter Market”. Again, this is a story about characters, not about character types. The focus, of course, is on Casey and Lise's effect on him, both as a complex person and as a technological manifestation which inspires both curiosity and horror in him. The other significant character, Casey's friend, the artist Rubin Stark, complicates and enriches Casey's—and the reader's—knowledge of Lise, even though Stark is finally revealed to know less about her than Casey does. The characters Gibson creates here are anything but types. Each of them is unique: quirky, human and prone towards the very sorts of untypical behaviour that prompts Casey to take Lise home, to “do one of those things you do and never have anything else” (p. 129).

These two apparently dissimilar stories stand apart from the Gibson norm because, due to an almost complete absence of violence, neither is in the characteristic mould of the hard-boiled thriller. This significant aspect of Gibson's approach hints that he is not writing thrillers, but, rather, is focusing on human psychology. Brief details of hitchhiker suicides are included in “Hinterlands”, but unpleasant details are kept to a minimum. The only notable exception is Hofmannstahl's grisly suicide, which is described in some detail. But even here, the actual suicide takes place off-stage, and only the literally bloodless results are included in the story. In “The Winter Market”, there is no physical violence of any sort. The distinctly subdued tone of these stories and the marked shift they represent from the violence of Gibson's “Sprawl” fiction emphasises that in these works Gibson is not providing thrillers of the sort represented by “Johnny Mnemonic”, Neuromancer, or Count Zero. Further, the characters are marked by a tendency towards action. Instead, disoriented, and grimly patient, they struggle with their situations, sometimes cringing in the face of phenomena they cannot understand, whether these phenomena result from alien influences, as in “Hinterlands”, or from human advancements, as in “The Winter Market”. The only character to throw off this lethargy is Halpert, but when he does so, entering the “handler-surrogate gestalt” (p. 80) before going into Leni Hofmannstahl's ship, he is not—strictly speaking—even entirely himself anymore. Instead, he is a computer-spliced amalgamation of the two.

What becomes apparent about these stories is that the technologies they contain are significant without being the foci that technologies often become in science fiction. Instead, the technologies, the marvels, and the extrapolated trends—all the elements that mark the stories as science fiction—allow Gibson to create unique characters and examine their psychologies and lives. Without the Tovyevski Anomaly, there could be no Toby Halpert. Lacking the environmental and technological conditions of the Sprawl, Lise could not exist. At their very cores, then, these stories explore characters in situations we can understand because they, like us, are faced by technological pressures every day. Their situations mirror our own. That is one achievement of the best science fiction, and it is certainly an achievement of Gibson's best work. He does not simply create fascinating situations, then construct convenient characters with whom to play show and tell. Gibson creates settings that leave indelible impressions on the characters who inhabit them, and the believable correspondence between the characters and their environments represents one means by which he integrates the various elements of his story to produce a cohesive, effective whole.

In light of Gibson's sensitivity to the necessary interconnectedness of character and setting, at least one of Gibson's authorial strengths is what Bruce Sterling terms his ability to “pinpoint social nerves” (Sterling, p. 2). Moreover, Gibson not only pinpoints those nerves, he exhibits a considerable sensitivity to them—particularly in “The Winter Market”, where Lise embodies the ways that the technological, industrial, and cultural realities of modern life alter humanity. Casey notes that the illness which confines Lise to an exoskeleton might be the result of one of the new environmental diseases “that they've barely even named yet” (p. 130). Realistically, Casey's initial reaction to her is to look, recognise her strangeness, then look away—like most people, to ignore and escape her. The radical isolation Lise feels as a result of this treatment is emphasised and deepened later, after she asks Casey, with hate and “some terrible parody of lust” (p. 122) in her eyes, if he wants to go to bed with her. She reveals that although her damaged nervous system prevents her from experiencing sexual sensation, she sometimes likes to watch her lovers feel what she cannot. In general, then, Lise is ignored, and even when she gets close enough to someone to have a lover, she does not so much participate as observe. Her only recourse—the only meaningful direction in which to direct her survival instinct—is towards a continued life beyond flesh, an existence that will free her from her body. But as Casey's final view of her reveals, even after she has given up on life, she would still like to watch one more time, “to kiss herself goodbye” even though for her that means she has “[t]o find someone drunk enough to do it for her” (p. 148).

Finally, Lise's continued existence and much of her pain results from the next century's most advanced medical and technological measures. Her body cannot feel, but her exoskeleton allows her to go through the motions of love-making, so that she can be repeatedly reminded of something which sets her apart from others. When machines and technology can no longer keep her alive, they distill her mind's essence into a program and place that distillation into the receptacle of a computer mainframe, enclosing her and narrowing her range of experience still more than her exoskeleton and damaged nervous system did when she was alive.

Lise's resonance as a character results from the reader's ability to identify with her. All of her characteristics which elicit reader sympathy have analogues in contemporary society. Her congenital condition is not so very different from illnesses resulting from environmental factors today. Her exoskeleton, at first strange, simply combines computer-brain interface technology with a logical extrapolation of the technologies that today provide increasingly complex artificial limbs. And her addiction to wizz is no more unusual than the contemporary appetite for illegal drugs. Finally, Lise's very familiarity makes her such a resonant figure—she represents our own twentieth-century society grown older but not wiser. She is not a character of a utopia nor of a dystopia. Instead, she occupies the middle ground and shows that things will remain pretty much the same, that society will develop new problems and new partial solutions, and that some will always be left outside looking in—that they, like Lise, have to be content just to watch.

Clearly, then, Gibson does more than provide interesting phenomena and characters, but interesting subject matter does not guarantee noteworthy fiction. What still remains at issue is the manner in which Gibson presents his material, and, in a case of considerable unanimity, critics have not found his talents wanting. As Feeley, Maddox, as nearly every critic to discuss Gibson's work have noted, his style is engaging and extremely effective. A stylistic analysis could, of course, explore a wide range of strengths, but, for the sake of brevity, I will address only one—his attention to detail. In “Hinterlands”, for instance, Halpert appears to digress in a full paragraph discussion of a particular species of vine in Heaven's pseudo-jungle. The paragraph concludes: “But I like those vines: The leaves are heart-shaped, and if you rub one between your hands, it smells like cinnamon” (p. 74). These concrete, familiar details contrast strongly with the context—where many aspects of the setting are necessarily unfamiliar. Significantly, though, the details of the paragraph's final sentence do more than simply add depth to the setting; they also tell the reader something about Halpert's sensitivity to his environment and the simple pleasure he derived from smelling cinnamon and touching a plant. These considerations echo his discussion of the “special kind of darkness” (p. 84) brought on by the drug Charmian provides. Halpert tells us that:

It was nothing like the darkness of Big Night, that sentient, hunting dark that waits to drag the hitchhikers down to Wards, that dark that incubates the Fear. It was a darkness like the shadows moving in the back seat of your parents' car, on a rainy night when you're five years old, warm and secure.

(p. 84)

In both cases the sensory details harken back to familiar, earthly things, highlighting Halpert's vulnerability in the face of the Highway, the damage that it does to the hitchhikers, and the damage that it does to him as a result of his continued but frustrated desire to go there. As a result of Gibson's careful use of detail, Halpert becomes more fully realised, more authentic and less of a type, just at the story does.

Gibson uses detail to equally effective ends in “The Winter Market”. As Casey chronicles his involvement with Lise, the gradual accumulation of details fleshes out the setting and the characters. In the course of this process, Gibson pays particular attention to mechanical devices and sounds they produce. When Casey and Lise are in his apartment, he comments that he hears her exoskeleton “click softly as it move[s] her” (p. 130). Throughout the story, Rubin's home “clicks and stirs … with the furtive activities of his smaller creations” (p. 148). This attention small sounds, to subtle clicks and stirs, culminates in the story's final sentence, when Casey hears a “clear and tiny sound”, yet another click, at the same time it “clicks” for him that Rubin is right, that he will eventually have to work with Lise again (p. 149). The sounds of Rubin's creations are presented dispassionately, clinically, while only the sound of an antique coffee machine possesses any particular character; the “roar of Rubin's antique espresso machine” (p. 128) comforts Casey. This is a sound from the past, produced by a machine built in a time before exoskeletons and new environmental diseases. This detail suggests and heightens the effect of the impending arrival of an antithetical, artificially generated sound Casey dreads: Lise's voice on the telephone. Again, the subtle details Gibson provides both contribute to the setting's verisimilitude and reinforce the story's concern with characters' lives.

Feeley states that the catharses of Gibson's characters are banal. In fact, the careful presentation of these stories insures that they are anything but banal. Consistently, Gibson's characters walk the fine line between strangeness and familiarity. Halpert, Casey, and Lise all confront situations the reader has never faced but which have identifiable roots that challenge the reader's imagination while capturing his or her sympathy. So although Gibson's fiction is couched in the tradition of the hard-boiled detective thriller, his alterations to that tradition allow him to undertake psychological explorations of resonant characters.

Clearly, then, the weaknesses attributed to Gibson's short fiction are not so much in the works themselves as they are in the critical community's failure to focus coherently on those stories that depart from the perceives norm of Gibson's fiction. Some of his short fiction is readily distinguished from the novels, but if we remain content to read these stories unimaginatively, their underlying substance will remain either unnoticed or largely misunderstood. Granted, not every work in Burning Chrome is a literary gem, but by taking a fresh and more careful look at Gibson's fiction we can recognise those works which will reward further consideration. The alternative is that the considerable substance of Gibson's short fiction will remain virtually untouched.

Notes

1. A focus on the novels does, of course, often make sense—for instance in necessarily directed discussions such as Glen Grant's “Transcendence Through Detournment in William Gibson's Neuromancer.” Peculiarly, though, even supposedly broad discussions of Gibson's work marginalise the short fiction. In addition to Gregory Feeley's review of Burning Chrome, see Danny Rirdan's “The Works of William Gibson” and Tom Maddox's “Cobra, She Said: An Interim Report on the Fiction of William Gibson”.

2. The term “cyberpunk” has been used in reference to such a range of stories and novels that is has become nearly meaningless. Still, although I agree with the assertion that cyberpunk is more a marketing concept than a distinct trend in science fiction (Delany, p. 35), I will use the term loosely here to refer to works of science fiction—particularly Gibson's—in which computer-brain interfaces are recurring elements in a world where illegal drugs, radical cosmetic surgery, and powerful multinational corporations are commonplaces.

Works Cited

Card, Orson Scott, “You Got No Friends in this World: A Quarterly Review Essay of Short Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Review, 56 (1985), pp. 22-3.

Delany, Samuel, R., “Is Cyberpunk a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?”, Mississippi Review, 16.2-3 (1988), pp. 28-35.

Feeley, Gregory, Review of Burning Chrome by William Gibson, Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, 36 (1986), pp. 97-98.

Gibson, William, Burning Chrome (New York, Arbor House, 1986).

Grant, Glenn, “Transcendence Through Detournment in William Gibson's Neuromancer”, Science-Fiction Studies, 17 (1990), pp. 41-49.

Maddox, Tom, “Cobra She Said: An Interim Report on the Fiction of William Gibson”, Fantasy Review, 9.4 (1986), pp. 46-48.

Rirdan, Danny, “The Works of William Gibson”, Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, 43 (1988), pp. 36-46.

Sterling, Bruce, Preface to Burning Chrome, by William Gibson, pp. 1-5.