The 1986 short story collection Burning Chrome by William Gibson was recommended to me by my deacon, who was surprised I’d never heard of Gibson, the apparent inventor of the “cyberpunk” genre.

I was immediately impressed by the book’s intense and driving style. I’ve often been irritated by stories that presume I need exposition for every invented idea; Gibson assumes the reader is smart enough to figure out what’s going on. Sometimes it can be tricky to suss out his neologisms and the wild logic of his worlds, fast-paced as they are, but the sussing is always worth it.

The volume contains a preface and ten short stories. A few of the stories are co-writes with other author’s I’ve never heard of (John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick) but might come to know as the years wind on. I’ll give brief summaries and opinions about each of the ten stories.

Johnny Mnemonic: I’d been familiar with this story from the movie version, which I never saw. This first story in the book starts off hot and running. The first line: “I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude.” Maybe I’m just a sucker for a gun in the first sentence, but I love it when a story starts off with a sense of extreme purpose. “Johnny Mnemonic” is in my top three for this book. Johnny’s job is to transport encrypted messages between parties (often corporate and criminal) by storing the messages in his own teched-out brain. Problem is, his last delivery didn’t go through, so he’s stuck with the data (which he can’t access) in his brain, and third-parties pursuing him to get at the data. The story moves through fascinating locations, and culminates in the coolest scene in the whole book. Worth a read.

The Gernsback Continuum: A photographer is hired to photograph 50’s-era architecture in the Western U.S. and begins seeing ghosts. A nice mellow-down after the intensity of “Johnny Mnemonic,” but a bit aimless, in my opinion.

Fragments of a Hologram Rose: Most of the stories in this book have some kind of romance element–a lost love, an unhealthy relationship, a forbidden lover. Fragments of a hologram rose is a short snapshot of a man avoiding viewing the contents of a tape left behind by his lover. Felt a bit underdeveloped to me, but maybe I just didn’t get it.

The Belonging Kind: A fun tale about a man tracking a woman who shapeshifts each time she moves from one nightclub to the next. He becomes obsessed with uncovering her mystery, and the story’s reveal is particularly creepy. This one’s a good read.

Hinterlands: This one’s also in my top three owing to its powerful concept. An anomaly has been discovered in space–a portal that transports its entrants to some unknown location elsewhere in the universe for an unpredictable length of time. Upon return, the voyager will experience intense, panicked psychosis and strong suicidal tendencies. Most returners succeed in killing themselves. But among their remains are often found strange artifacts with powerful technologies, which prompts nations to invest in sending more voyagers through the portal in the hopes they’ll return with treasures. The protagonist is a member of the team responsible for receiving the voyagers on their return from the portal. The return environment is an Edenic space station designed to reduce the likelihood of voyager suicide. Like in the other stories, the protagonist has a love interest, and the two of them tenderly attempt to disburden themselves of the psychic burden of their responsibilities, especially when they fail. A cool concept for a story, very original and complete, and a good blend of concrete sci-fi details with more abstract personal and social ones.

Red Star, Winter Orbit: Soviets scrabbling out a fairly depressing and dysfunctional existence on a soon-to-be-decommissioned space station. The protagonist, a once-respected military higher-up, wants to stay on the station, and must enact a mutinous plan to preserve the one thing that makes his life worth living. Cool concept, but it didn’t grab me because it felt too short and underdeveloped.

New Rose Hotel: A classic tale of mercenary corporate espionage. The way this corporate future is imagined is really fun: corporate edge is gained by employing the most intellectually gifted scientists, who themselves become the real commodities. Companies try to literally steal scientists from their rivals, because employing these brilliant minds means nearly certain profits from newly-developed technologies, pharmaceuticals, etc. The protagonist is one of the thieves, and he enters into a partnership with his friend and a femme fatale to devise an elaborate extraction and delivery scheme upon a famed Japanese scientist. Amid this scheme, the protagonist develops an attachment to the femme fatale. A fun one, but not in my top three.

The Winter Market: The protagonist is the future-equivalent of a music producer/engineer, but albums are instead composed of curated and carefully-composed memories that consumers receive directly into their brains. The engineer meets, through his avante-garde artist/mad-scientist friend (one of my favorite characters in the book), a physically and emotionally broken woman name Lise, who in a strange sort of one-night-stand, “plays” her life directly into the protagonist’s brain, who is so moved by her tragic story that he recognizes it as the next big industry production. Reluctantly, he introduces Lise to company execs and she begins the familiar path toward pop stardom, complete with self-destruction. The protagonist feels the way you’d expect, and while it’s a clever tale, the story lacks a clear gut punch.

Dogfight: A low-class “proleboy” shoplifter kipes a brain-controlled airplane dogfighting game in the hopes of defeating a local champion in a head-to-head battle at a local bar. The protagonist meets a brilliant college girl who takes a liking to him, but she as an implanted chastity program that prevents her from having any physical relationship with the protagonist. Her programming acumen and friendship helps him to improve at the game, which he cares about more than anything else. Some interesting emotional beats in this story make it feel fresh.

Burning Chrome: I was surprised to be unimpressed with the titular story of this collection. Like “New Rose Hotel,” this one’s about a digital heist job that of course ties in an unfulfilled romance. The concept that digital data are represented and navigated in a virtual space feels totally dated and silly, and while that’s an ignorable feature of the story, it still makes the whole thing feel a bit absurd, which is interesting given that all of the other stories in the book have unbelievable sci-fi elements without feeling goofy.

Overall, I thought this was a great book, and I’m interested in reading something longer from Gibson. My top picks from this book are “Johnny Mnemonic,” “Hinterlands,” and “The Belonging Kind.”