I read this book mainly because I was curious about the short story “Johnny Mnemonic”. There are a couple other Sprawl short stories as well: “China Rose Hotel” and “Burning Chrome”. Having come to these stories after reading a few of Gibson’s novels makes some of the things I’ve previously read fall into place. He’s still developing his style, so the stories are more directly narrated and easier to follow. He also takes some time to explain some of the elements of his Sprawl setting, while in the novels he expects the readers to already know. It’s fun to read the development as the author works out the details of the world he is building. And some of the building blocks are later cannibalized for his novels.
The other stories are interesting in the sense that it’s like reading an alternate universe William Gibson. When Gibson hit pay-dirt with Neuromancer, he became pigeon-holed. You know what you are getting when you read one of his books. But when he was still trying to make it, he wrote short stories in a wider variety of science fiction sub-genres and his distinctive writing style had yet to crystallize.
For me, the most memorable story is “The Hinterlands”. While it is ultimately unsatisfying, the themes regarding how much we can and ought to sacrifice for scientific progress are fascinating.
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