The Marginalised Short Stories of William Gibson

Yale, Jeffrey. "The Marginalised Short Stories of William Gibson: 'Hinterlands' and 'The Winter Market.'" Foundation #58 (Summer 1993): 76-84.

Argues that Gibson's short fiction has been too readily dismissed or ignored by critics focusing on the cyberpunk novels, particularly Neuromancer. Burning Chrome contains every story Gibson had written or collaborated upon up to 1986, many of which are neither stereotypical nor immature. "Hinterlands" is a continuum-leaping space-travel story that concentrates not on the journey but the powerful impulse by the travelers to commit suicide upon their return to Earth. "The Winter Market" tells the story of a deathly-ill artist kept alive in an exoskeleton. Eventually, the artist has her personality encoded into a computer program, and thereby she achieves a bizarre form of immortality. The technologies contained in Burning Chrome are "significant without being the foci that technologies often become in science fiction." (RFS, 27/04/95)