Burning Chrome

Capitalism and consumerism are important concepts in the stories collected in Burning Chrome, but the stories also focus on the discarded and leftover elements of their economic and cultural systems. Images of old, broken, and reused equipment and objects populate the collection. These elements simultaneously symbolize cultural decay and the resourcefulness and ingenuity of characters.

Parker from “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” who is addicted to his ASP machine, demonstrates how characters subsist on broken technology. The ASP machine is Parker’s link to memories of Angela, but tangible reminders of her existence—a broken strap from her sandal, a hologram postcard that he shreds in the garbage disposal—are even more poignant. He calls these discarded objects “evidence of love” (39). Parker is barely hanging on, as the broken items around him emphasize. In contrast, the landscape of Nighttown, home of the Lo Teks in “Johnny Mnemonic,” is an example of how characters repurpose discarded items. The group has built their home, an entire section of the city, out of garbage; Johnny calls it a “disused maintenance yard, stacked with triangular roofing segments. Everything there had been covered with that same uniform layer of spraybomb graffiti” (15). He later refers to part of it as a “junkyard.” Though they live on the fringes of society, the Lo Teks have chosen to reject the technological progress of mainstream culture and instead built their own world from cultural leftovers.

Rubin from “The Winter Market,” however, provides the most definitive philosophizing on the significance of garbage and repurposed items. Casey calls him the “Gomi no sensei. Master of junk” for obsessively collecting “garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on” (126). At one point, Casey observes Rubin navigating through boxes of his stuff, giving a litany of junk: “lithium batteries, tantalum capacitors, RF connectors, breadboards, […] the severed heads of hundreds of Barbie dolls […] industrial safety gauntlets” (134). “Kipple” is an allusion to science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who defined the word in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as useless objects that seem to multiply themselves. Rubin is a kind of historian of past relics, a constant reminder that the material world of the present is built on the consumerist productivity of the past. In this sense, his gomi resembles a literal manifestation of the “semiotic ghosts” mentioned in “The Gernsback Continuum”—ideas that impact culture in an almost subliminal way. In another sense, his construction of a home out of garbage exemplifies the cyberpunk ability to modify whatever technological material is at hand in the service of survival.