Very nearly a cyberpunk genre defining classic, but that crown has to go to Gibson's Neuromancer, 29 Oct 2008
Gangsters, double crosses, hustles, hallucinogenics, neural interfaces, virtual reality: elements of the past and future fused together. Burning Chrome is a drug-fuelled, high-tech, rollercoaster ride in the dark. Packed with fragmented sentences and jargon, Burning Chrome is not an easy read, but a compelling one. These stories will not be to everyone's likening. They are a difficult read, packed with unpleasant characters in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes there is a lesson to be learned, but generally only the winning matters. They are as beguiling as a car crash. In some other books, the future is bright. In Burning Chrome, it may be orange but it is dark and scary. Inhabited with gangsters committing high-tech crimes or bio-terrorism, this is not a pleasant place to be.

Gibson's aggressive poetry is brutally beautiful. The prose is fragmented; quantum. Perception jumps. Vision blurs as if through a drugged haze. Jargon real and invented beguile and bamboozle. Gibson himself, like Philip K Dick, was no stranger to narcotics and his experience is made flesh in these stories. Published in magazines between 1977 and 84, these stories came at the start of the revolution in popular computing and a sea change in science fiction. The cyberpunk stories of Gibson and his collaborators threw out the shiny futures and political dystopias, and brought in a new dystopian vision where mega-corporations and organised crime ruled (though sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference). These stories are not Star Trek, but criminals with computers; lock, stock and two smoking hard drives. The future has brought technology but it has not cured us of the sins of humanity; it has only enabled new ones.

This is classic cyberpunk in bite-sized portions.

There are No Maps For These QuickSilver Territories, 27 Sep 2007
It can be stated that it is worthy for one to learn English only to be able to read NEW ROSE HOTEL in the original. No translation can do justice to Gibson's fresh prose. I realize that the cannon-setters might not agree, however, for me, these are the BEST 28 pages ever written in English. With Gibson SF entered its Golden Age.

All of the short stories contained are excellent. However, my favorites are all of the three Sprawl ones: JOHNY MNEMONIC, NEW ROSE HOTEL and BURNING CHROME; at par is the Soviet retro (nowadays) HINTERLANDS.

Never before or since have I came upon comparable poetic dreamscapes of futuristic noir dystopia. The images are so concentrated they just burst from the reader's mind to create a detailed alternative reality. And it is not that the Novels are diluted - they are just more of the good stuff!

My advice: read BURNING CHROME *AFTER* the famous trilogy (NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO, MONA LISA OVERDRIVE). They will help you understand the precursor ideas for the rich atmospheric world that followed.
[Do not watch the NEW ROSE HOTEL movie. Do so for JOHNY MNEMONIC neither. They do no justice to these literature gems].

Highly Recommended!

Recommended -- but with reservations., 22 Dec 2001
William Gibson is best known as the author of Neuromancer -- his first novel, which caused him to be hailed in  The Sunday Times as "the information age's resident populist prophet".
The book reviewed here is a collection of ten short stories, including his first published story Fragments of a Hologram Rose from 1977.

Gibson's style has been described as "a combination of low-life and high-tech". This collection shows how perceptive he can be in observing both. Gibson doesn't just use technology as a back-drop or to provide props; he considers the effects that developments in technology might have upon individuals and societies. In Johnny Mnemonic for example a character explains:--

"We're an information economy. They teach you that at school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified."

Gibson describes also the detail of low-life settings. In this collection there are very good descriptions of different types of bars in The Belonging Kind. He paints portraits of different characters, Deke in Dogfight, Lese in The Winter Market, with different colours and shades.

Ultimately, however, he extrapolates from a mass (or media) consciousness of the present. Gibson has interesting things to say but he is not a prophet. The future will not be the same as his stories. The Soviet Union has not dominated space research (as in Red Star, Winter Orbit), in fact it no longer exists. Many future developments will derive not from mass actions or popular consciousness, but from the work of "outsiders". Instead of looking just at what is now considered "central", perhaps he should view what is emerging at the edge....

A collection that you must not miss., 27 May 2001
This collection contains ten stories, seven of which are solo works by William Gibson and the other three are collaborations. Nine appeared previously between 1977 and 1985 and one was new for this collection.

Gibson writes hard, technical cyber-punk SF with the art of a real master of the short story genre. Good SF shorts are of course all about ideas, situations and snappy plot twists but great examples of this genre also pack in characters that you can understand and root for and worlds that come to life in your head. It is hard to do that and only a handful of writers can turn out work of this quality.

The opening shot in the book, "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those rare tales that burns its way into your head. Reading it is almost like being there watching the events unfold. The narrative makes the outlandish grunge-tech future come to life and it is easy to see how this tale inspired the making of a movie.

It is a powerful start and the rest of the book does not disappoint. From the anonymous barfly world of "The Belonging Kind", up into the dying orbit of an old Russian space station in "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and back to the seedy hacker world of "Burning Chrome" Gibson delivers a set of tales for which the phrase "assault on the senses" is no exaggeration.

The book is a fine introduction to both Gibson and the cyber-punk genre and it is a book that every SF fan should own and re-read regularly. If you like it and to want to explore similar work, I'd suggest "A Good Old Fashioned Future" by Bruce Sterling, or the "Mirrorshades" anthology.

A great collection of short stories not to be missed, 11 Oct 2000
Gibson gives his best in the hard work of recalling, fixing and arranging moments in short, moving and touchy stories. Great stories like "Burning Chrome", "Fragments of a hologram rose", "Jhonny Mnemonic" or "New Rose Hotel" show the hints of the world he unrolls in his novels, but maybe the most wonderful thing is seeing him at work on completly different styles than usual, like in the astinishing "Hinterand". A great collection, a must to every Gibson-fan.

Very nearly a cyberpunk genre defining classic, but that crown has to go to Gibson's Neuromancer, 29 Oct 2008
Gangsters, double crosses, hustles, hallucinogenics, neural interfaces, virtual reality: elements of the past and future fused together. Burning Chrome is a drug-fuelled, high-tech, rollercoaster ride in the dark. Packed with fragmented sentences and jargon, Burning Chrome is not an easy read, but a compelling one. These stories will not be to everyone's likening. They are a difficult read, packed with unpleasant characters in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes there is a lesson to be learned, but generally only the winning matters. They are as beguiling as a car crash. In some other books, the future is bright. In Burning Chrome, it may be orange but it is dark and scary. Inhabited with gangsters committing high-tech crimes or bio-terrorism, this is not a pleasant place to be.

Gibson's aggressive poetry is brutally beautiful. The prose is fragmented; quantum. Perception jumps. Vision blurs as if through a drugged haze. Jargon real and invented beguile and bamboozle. Gibson himself, like Philip K Dick, was no stranger to narcotics and his experience is made flesh in these stories. Published in magazines between 1977 and 84, these stories came at the start of the revolution in popular computing and a sea change in science fiction. The cyberpunk stories of Gibson and his collaborators threw out the shiny futures and political dystopias, and brought in a new dystopian vision where mega-corporations and organised crime ruled (though sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference). These stories are not Star Trek, but criminals with computers; lock, stock and two smoking hard drives. The future has brought technology but it has not cured us of the sins of humanity; it has only enabled new ones.

This is classic cyberpunk in bite-sized portions.

There are No Maps For These QuickSilver Territories, 27 Sep 2007
It can be stated that it is worthy for one to learn English only to be able to read NEW ROSE HOTEL in the original. No translation can do justice to Gibson's fresh prose. I realize that the cannon-setters might not agree, however, for me, these are the BEST 28 pages ever written in English. With Gibson SF entered its Golden Age.

All of the short stories contained are excellent. However, my favorites are all of the three Sprawl ones: JOHNY MNEMONIC, NEW ROSE HOTEL and BURNING CHROME; at par is the Soviet retro (nowadays) HINTERLANDS.

Never before or since have I came upon comparable poetic dreamscapes of futuristic noir dystopia. The images are so concentrated they just burst from the reader's mind to create a detailed alternative reality. And it is not that the Novels are diluted - they are just more of the good stuff!

My advice: read BURNING CHROME *AFTER* the famous trilogy (NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO, MONA LISA OVERDRIVE). They will help you understand the precursor ideas for the rich atmospheric world that followed.
[Do not watch the NEW ROSE HOTEL movie. Do so for JOHNY MNEMONIC neither. They do no justice to these literature gems].

Highly Recommended!

Recommended -- but with reservations., 22 Dec 2001
William Gibson is best known as the author of Neuromancer -- his first novel, which caused him to be hailed in  The Sunday Times as "the information age's resident populist prophet".
The book reviewed here is a collection of ten short stories, including his first published story Fragments of a Hologram Rose from 1977.

Gibson's style has been described as "a combination of low-life and high-tech". This collection shows how perceptive he can be in observing both. Gibson doesn't just use technology as a back-drop or to provide props; he considers the effects that developments in technology might have upon individuals and societies. In Johnny Mnemonic for example a character explains:--

"We're an information economy. They teach you that at school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified."

Gibson describes also the detail of low-life settings. In this collection there are very good descriptions of different types of bars in The Belonging Kind. He paints portraits of different characters, Deke in Dogfight, Lese in The Winter Market, with different colours and shades.

Ultimately, however, he extrapolates from a mass (or media) consciousness of the present. Gibson has interesting things to say but he is not a prophet. The future will not be the same as his stories. The Soviet Union has not dominated space research (as in Red Star, Winter Orbit), in fact it no longer exists. Many future developments will derive not from mass actions or popular consciousness, but from the work of "outsiders". Instead of looking just at what is now considered "central", perhaps he should view what is emerging at the edge....

A collection that you must not miss., 27 May 2001
This collection contains ten stories, seven of which are solo works by William Gibson and the other three are collaborations. Nine appeared previously between 1977 and 1985 and one was new for this collection.

Gibson writes hard, technical cyber-punk SF with the art of a real master of the short story genre. Good SF shorts are of course all about ideas, situations and snappy plot twists but great examples of this genre also pack in characters that you can understand and root for and worlds that come to life in your head. It is hard to do that and only a handful of writers can turn out work of this quality.

The opening shot in the book, "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those rare tales that burns its way into your head. Reading it is almost like being there watching the events unfold. The narrative makes the outlandish grunge-tech future come to life and it is easy to see how this tale inspired the making of a movie.

It is a powerful start and the rest of the book does not disappoint. From the anonymous barfly world of "The Belonging Kind", up into the dying orbit of an old Russian space station in "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and back to the seedy hacker world of "Burning Chrome" Gibson delivers a set of tales for which the phrase "assault on the senses" is no exaggeration.

The book is a fine introduction to both Gibson and the cyber-punk genre and it is a book that every SF fan should own and re-read regularly. If you like it and to want to explore similar work, I'd suggest "A Good Old Fashioned Future" by Bruce Sterling, or the "Mirrorshades" anthology.

A great collection of short stories not to be missed, 11 Oct 2000
Gibson gives his best in the hard work of recalling, fixing and arranging moments in short, moving and touchy stories. Great stories like "Burning Chrome", "Fragments of a hologram rose", "Jhonny Mnemonic" or "New Rose Hotel" show the hints of the world he unrolls in his novels, but maybe the most wonderful thing is seeing him at work on completly different styles than usual, like in the astinishing "Hinterand". A great collection, a must to every Gibson-fan.

A few nicities, a few oddities ..., 11 Jul 2006
Many of the stories are excellent, with sudden twists at the end to highlight the skill of the author in bringing you to a place that you didn't expect.

Bus Driver is a fairly easy parable, my personal favourite was Breaking the Pig, whereas Kneller's Happy Campers is a bit of a purgatorial oddity - in more ways than one.

If you fancy a change from a long novel, for a few gambits of lateral israel-inspired storytelling, then read this.

Don't waste your money, 03 Feb 2006
Despits rave reviews, this book is absolutely rubbish. Most of the stories were so short (some less than 2 pages) to have no substance at all. A couple of small sniggers was all this book could raise from me. I will not be fooled into buying anymore books by this particular author. I gave this book 1 star.... because i can't give it none!

Short and hilarious stories, 12 Aug 2005
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God is an enjoyable collection to read. Etgar Keret emerged as witty, penetrating, humurous and very knowing. He is a fresh breath of to short story writing.Short stories by Chekhov, The Usurper and Other Stories, Runaway,Union Moujik are other fine and hilarious books to read.

brilliant stories, 25 Nov 2001
This is a selection of stories taken from previous colections by Etgar Keret, but it is his first book published in English. Read it and see why Keret has become such a big name in his own coutry, and such an important role model for younger writers. The stories are short, smart funny and brilliant. Read them now and look out for the one about the pipes.

Very nearly a cyberpunk genre defining classic, but that crown has to go to Gibson's Neuromancer, 29 Oct 2008
Gangsters, double crosses, hustles, hallucinogenics, neural interfaces, virtual reality: elements of the past and future fused together. Burning Chrome is a drug-fuelled, high-tech, rollercoaster ride in the dark. Packed with fragmented sentences and jargon, Burning Chrome is not an easy read, but a compelling one. These stories will not be to everyone's likening. They are a difficult read, packed with unpleasant characters in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes there is a lesson to be learned, but generally only the winning matters. They are as beguiling as a car crash. In some other books, the future is bright. In Burning Chrome, it may be orange but it is dark and scary. Inhabited with gangsters committing high-tech crimes or bio-terrorism, this is not a pleasant place to be.

Gibson's aggressive poetry is brutally beautiful. The prose is fragmented; quantum. Perception jumps. Vision blurs as if through a drugged haze. Jargon real and invented beguile and bamboozle. Gibson himself, like Philip K Dick, was no stranger to narcotics and his experience is made flesh in these stories. Published in magazines between 1977 and 84, these stories came at the start of the revolution in popular computing and a sea change in science fiction. The cyberpunk stories of Gibson and his collaborators threw out the shiny futures and political dystopias, and brought in a new dystopian vision where mega-corporations and organised crime ruled (though sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference). These stories are not Star Trek, but criminals with computers; lock, stock and two smoking hard drives. The future has brought technology but it has not cured us of the sins of humanity; it has only enabled new ones.

This is classic cyberpunk in bite-sized portions.

There are No Maps For These QuickSilver Territories, 27 Sep 2007
It can be stated that it is worthy for one to learn English only to be able to read NEW ROSE HOTEL in the original. No translation can do justice to Gibson's fresh prose. I realize that the cannon-setters might not agree, however, for me, these are the BEST 28 pages ever written in English. With Gibson SF entered its Golden Age.

All of the short stories contained are excellent. However, my favorites are all of the three Sprawl ones: JOHNY MNEMONIC, NEW ROSE HOTEL and BURNING CHROME; at par is the Soviet retro (nowadays) HINTERLANDS.

Never before or since have I came upon comparable poetic dreamscapes of futuristic noir dystopia. The images are so concentrated they just burst from the reader's mind to create a detailed alternative reality. And it is not that the Novels are diluted - they are just more of the good stuff!

My advice: read BURNING CHROME *AFTER* the famous trilogy (NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO, MONA LISA OVERDRIVE). They will help you understand the precursor ideas for the rich atmospheric world that followed.
[Do not watch the NEW ROSE HOTEL movie. Do so for JOHNY MNEMONIC neither. They do no justice to these literature gems].

Highly Recommended!

Recommended -- but with reservations., 22 Dec 2001
William Gibson is best known as the author of Neuromancer -- his first novel, which caused him to be hailed in  The Sunday Times as "the information age's resident populist prophet".
The book reviewed here is a collection of ten short stories, including his first published story Fragments of a Hologram Rose from 1977.

Gibson's style has been described as "a combination of low-life and high-tech". This collection shows how perceptive he can be in observing both. Gibson doesn't just use technology as a back-drop or to provide props; he considers the effects that developments in technology might have upon individuals and societies. In Johnny Mnemonic for example a character explains:--

"We're an information economy. They teach you that at school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified."

Gibson describes also the detail of low-life settings. In this collection there are very good descriptions of different types of bars in The Belonging Kind. He paints portraits of different characters, Deke in Dogfight, Lese in The Winter Market, with different colours and shades.

Ultimately, however, he extrapolates from a mass (or media) consciousness of the present. Gibson has interesting things to say but he is not a prophet. The future will not be the same as his stories. The Soviet Union has not dominated space research (as in Red Star, Winter Orbit), in fact it no longer exists. Many future developments will derive not from mass actions or popular consciousness, but from the work of "outsiders". Instead of looking just at what is now considered "central", perhaps he should view what is emerging at the edge....

A collection that you must not miss., 27 May 2001
This collection contains ten stories, seven of which are solo works by William Gibson and the other three are collaborations. Nine appeared previously between 1977 and 1985 and one was new for this collection.

Gibson writes hard, technical cyber-punk SF with the art of a real master of the short story genre. Good SF shorts are of course all about ideas, situations and snappy plot twists but great examples of this genre also pack in characters that you can understand and root for and worlds that come to life in your head. It is hard to do that and only a handful of writers can turn out work of this quality.

The opening shot in the book, "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those rare tales that burns its way into your head. Reading it is almost like being there watching the events unfold. The narrative makes the outlandish grunge-tech future come to life and it is easy to see how this tale inspired the making of a movie.

It is a powerful start and the rest of the book does not disappoint. From the anonymous barfly world of "The Belonging Kind", up into the dying orbit of an old Russian space station in "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and back to the seedy hacker world of "Burning Chrome" Gibson delivers a set of tales for which the phrase "assault on the senses" is no exaggeration.

The book is a fine introduction to both Gibson and the cyber-punk genre and it is a book that every SF fan should own and re-read regularly. If you like it and to want to explore similar work, I'd suggest "A Good Old Fashioned Future" by Bruce Sterling, or the "Mirrorshades" anthology.

A great collection of short stories not to be missed, 11 Oct 2000
Gibson gives his best in the hard work of recalling, fixing and arranging moments in short, moving and touchy stories. Great stories like "Burning Chrome", "Fragments of a hologram rose", "Jhonny Mnemonic" or "New Rose Hotel" show the hints of the world he unrolls in his novels, but maybe the most wonderful thing is seeing him at work on completly different styles than usual, like in the astinishing "Hinterand". A great collection, a must to every Gibson-fan.

A few nicities, a few oddities ..., 11 Jul 2006
Many of the stories are excellent, with sudden twists at the end to highlight the skill of the author in bringing you to a place that you didn't expect.

Bus Driver is a fairly easy parable, my personal favourite was Breaking the Pig, whereas Kneller's Happy Campers is a bit of a purgatorial oddity - in more ways than one.

If you fancy a change from a long novel, for a few gambits of lateral israel-inspired storytelling, then read this.

Don't waste your money, 03 Feb 2006
Despits rave reviews, this book is absolutely rubbish. Most of the stories were so short (some less than 2 pages) to have no substance at all. A couple of small sniggers was all this book could raise from me. I will not be fooled into buying anymore books by this particular author. I gave this book 1 star.... because i can't give it none!

Short and hilarious stories, 12 Aug 2005
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God is an enjoyable collection to read. Etgar Keret emerged as witty, penetrating, humurous and very knowing. He is a fresh breath of to short story writing.Short stories by Chekhov, The Usurper and Other Stories, Runaway,Union Moujik are other fine and hilarious books to read.

brilliant stories, 25 Nov 2001
This is a selection of stories taken from previous colections by Etgar Keret, but it is his first book published in English. Read it and see why Keret has become such a big name in his own coutry, and such an important role model for younger writers. The stories are short, smart funny and brilliant. Read them now and look out for the one about the pipes.

Excellent, 06 Nov 2007
I really enjoyed this book and it portrays a true reflection of what the society is going through regarding christianity.

Very Good, 26 Oct 2007
When I started read this book I wasn't sure what to expect but a few pages down the line and I couldn't put this book down. There's a lot a drama and true to life situations. Some sad bits but thats life for yah. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and now i'm reading 'i know i've been changed' by the same author.

Very good book!, 30 Nov 2005
This was the first time I read a Christian novel, and I was not disappointed by the story. This is very well-written and the more I was reading the more I wanted to know what was going to happen. Reshonda raised issues of life that few people like to deal with. This is a very honest book. Well done!

Very nearly a cyberpunk genre defining classic, but that crown has to go to Gibson's Neuromancer, 29 Oct 2008
Gangsters, double crosses, hustles, hallucinogenics, neural interfaces, virtual reality: elements of the past and future fused together. Burning Chrome is a drug-fuelled, high-tech, rollercoaster ride in the dark. Packed with fragmented sentences and jargon, Burning Chrome is not an easy read, but a compelling one. These stories will not be to everyone's likening. They are a difficult read, packed with unpleasant characters in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes there is a lesson to be learned, but generally only the winning matters. They are as beguiling as a car crash. In some other books, the future is bright. In Burning Chrome, it may be orange but it is dark and scary. Inhabited with gangsters committing high-tech crimes or bio-terrorism, this is not a pleasant place to be.

Gibson's aggressive poetry is brutally beautiful. The prose is fragmented; quantum. Perception jumps. Vision blurs as if through a drugged haze. Jargon real and invented beguile and bamboozle. Gibson himself, like Philip K Dick, was no stranger to narcotics and his experience is made flesh in these stories. Published in magazines between 1977 and 84, these stories came at the start of the revolution in popular computing and a sea change in science fiction. The cyberpunk stories of Gibson and his collaborators threw out the shiny futures and political dystopias, and brought in a new dystopian vision where mega-corporations and organised crime ruled (though sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference). These stories are not Star Trek, but criminals with computers; lock, stock and two smoking hard drives. The future has brought technology but it has not cured us of the sins of humanity; it has only enabled new ones.

This is classic cyberpunk in bite-sized portions.

There are No Maps For These QuickSilver Territories, 27 Sep 2007
It can be stated that it is worthy for one to learn English only to be able to read NEW ROSE HOTEL in the original. No translation can do justice to Gibson's fresh prose. I realize that the cannon-setters might not agree, however, for me, these are the BEST 28 pages ever written in English. With Gibson SF entered its Golden Age.

All of the short stories contained are excellent. However, my favorites are all of the three Sprawl ones: JOHNY MNEMONIC, NEW ROSE HOTEL and BURNING CHROME; at par is the Soviet retro (nowadays) HINTERLANDS.

Never before or since have I came upon comparable poetic dreamscapes of futuristic noir dystopia. The images are so concentrated they just burst from the reader's mind to create a detailed alternative reality. And it is not that the Novels are diluted - they are just more of the good stuff!

My advice: read BURNING CHROME *AFTER* the famous trilogy (NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO, MONA LISA OVERDRIVE). They will help you understand the precursor ideas for the rich atmospheric world that followed.
[Do not watch the NEW ROSE HOTEL movie. Do so for JOHNY MNEMONIC neither. They do no justice to these literature gems].

Highly Recommended!

Recommended -- but with reservations., 22 Dec 2001
William Gibson is best known as the author of Neuromancer -- his first novel, which caused him to be hailed in  The Sunday Times as "the information age's resident populist prophet".
The book reviewed here is a collection of ten short stories, including his first published story Fragments of a Hologram Rose from 1977.

Gibson's style has been described as "a combination of low-life and high-tech". This collection shows how perceptive he can be in observing both. Gibson doesn't just use technology as a back-drop or to provide props; he considers the effects that developments in technology might have upon individuals and societies. In Johnny Mnemonic for example a character explains:--

"We're an information economy. They teach you that at school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified."

Gibson describes also the detail of low-life settings. In this collection there are very good descriptions of different types of bars in The Belonging Kind. He paints portraits of different characters, Deke in Dogfight, Lese in The Winter Market, with different colours and shades.

Ultimately, however, he extrapolates from a mass (or media) consciousness of the present. Gibson has interesting things to say but he is not a prophet. The future will not be the same as his stories. The Soviet Union has not dominated space research (as in Red Star, Winter Orbit), in fact it no longer exists. Many future developments will derive not from mass actions or popular consciousness, but from the work of "outsiders". Instead of looking just at what is now considered "central", perhaps he should view what is emerging at the edge....

A collection that you must not miss., 27 May 2001
This collection contains ten stories, seven of which are solo works by William Gibson and the other three are collaborations. Nine appeared previously between 1977 and 1985 and one was new for this collection.

Gibson writes hard, technical cyber-punk SF with the art of a real master of the short story genre. Good SF shorts are of course all about ideas, situations and snappy plot twists but great examples of this genre also pack in characters that you can understand and root for and worlds that come to life in your head. It is hard to do that and only a handful of writers can turn out work of this quality.

The opening shot in the book, "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those rare tales that burns its way into your head. Reading it is almost like being there watching the events unfold. The narrative makes the outlandish grunge-tech future come to life and it is easy to see how this tale inspired the making of a movie.

It is a powerful start and the rest of the book does not disappoint. From the anonymous barfly world of "The Belonging Kind", up into the dying orbit of an old Russian space station in "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and back to the seedy hacker world of "Burning Chrome" Gibson delivers a set of tales for which the phrase "assault on the senses" is no exaggeration.

The book is a fine introduction to both Gibson and the cyber-punk genre and it is a book that every SF fan should own and re-read regularly. If you like it and to want to explore similar work, I'd suggest "A Good Old Fashioned Future" by Bruce Sterling, or the "Mirrorshades" anthology.

A great collection of short stories not to be missed, 11 Oct 2000
Gibson gives his best in the hard work of recalling, fixing and arranging moments in short, moving and touchy stories. Great stories like "Burning Chrome", "Fragments of a hologram rose", "Jhonny Mnemonic" or "New Rose Hotel" show the hints of the world he unrolls in his novels, but maybe the most wonderful thing is seeing him at work on completly different styles than usual, like in the astinishing "Hinterand". A great collection, a must to every Gibson-fan.

A few nicities, a few oddities ..., 11 Jul 2006
Many of the stories are excellent, with sudden twists at the end to highlight the skill of the author in bringing you to a place that you didn't expect.

Bus Driver is a fairly easy parable, my personal favourite was Breaking the Pig, whereas Kneller's Happy Campers is a bit of a purgatorial oddity - in more ways than one.

If you fancy a change from a long novel, for a few gambits of lateral israel-inspired storytelling, then read this.

Don't waste your money, 03 Feb 2006
Despits rave reviews, this book is absolutely rubbish. Most of the stories were so short (some less than 2 pages) to have no substance at all. A couple of small sniggers was all this book could raise from me. I will not be fooled into buying anymore books by this particular author. I gave this book 1 star.... because i can't give it none!

Short and hilarious stories, 12 Aug 2005
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God is an enjoyable collection to read. Etgar Keret emerged as witty, penetrating, humurous and very knowing. He is a fresh breath of to short story writing.Short stories by Chekhov, The Usurper and Other Stories, Runaway,Union Moujik are other fine and hilarious books to read.

brilliant stories, 25 Nov 2001
This is a selection of stories taken from previous colections by Etgar Keret, but it is his first book published in English. Read it and see why Keret has become such a big name in his own coutry, and such an important role model for younger writers. The stories are short, smart funny and brilliant. Read them now and look out for the one about the pipes.

Excellent, 06 Nov 2007
I really enjoyed this book and it portrays a true reflection of what the society is going through regarding christianity.

Very Good, 26 Oct 2007
When I started read this book I wasn't sure what to expect but a few pages down the line and I couldn't put this book down. There's a lot a drama and true to life situations. Some sad bits but thats life for yah. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and now i'm reading 'i know i've been changed' by the same author.

Very good book!, 30 Nov 2005
This was the first time I read a Christian novel, and I was not disappointed by the story. This is very well-written and the more I was reading the more I wanted to know what was going to happen. Reshonda raised issues of life that few people like to deal with. This is a very honest book. Well done!

Ted Dekker does it again..., 25 Jun 2006
Another exciting tale from a brilliant writer. Quite a dark story exploring the depths of evil that reside in the human psyche.
Really good read, kept me riveted to the pages.

Very nearly a cyberpunk genre defining classic, but that crown has to go to Gibson's Neuromancer, 29 Oct 2008
Gangsters, double crosses, hustles, hallucinogenics, neural interfaces, virtual reality: elements of the past and future fused together. Burning Chrome is a drug-fuelled, high-tech, rollercoaster ride in the dark. Packed with fragmented sentences and jargon, Burning Chrome is not an easy read, but a compelling one. These stories will not be to everyone's likening. They are a difficult read, packed with unpleasant characters in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes there is a lesson to be learned, but generally only the winning matters. They are as beguiling as a car crash. In some other books, the future is bright. In Burning Chrome, it may be orange but it is dark and scary. Inhabited with gangsters committing high-tech crimes or bio-terrorism, this is not a pleasant place to be.

Gibson's aggressive poetry is brutally beautiful. The prose is fragmented; quantum. Perception jumps. Vision blurs as if through a drugged haze. Jargon real and invented beguile and bamboozle. Gibson himself, like Philip K Dick, was no stranger to narcotics and his experience is made flesh in these stories. Published in magazines between 1977 and 84, these stories came at the start of the revolution in popular computing and a sea change in science fiction. The cyberpunk stories of Gibson and his collaborators threw out the shiny futures and political dystopias, and brought in a new dystopian vision where mega-corporations and organised crime ruled (though sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference). These stories are not Star Trek, but criminals with computers; lock, stock and two smoking hard drives. The future has brought technology but it has not cured us of the sins of humanity; it has only enabled new ones.

This is classic cyberpunk in bite-sized portions.

There are No Maps For These QuickSilver Territories, 27 Sep 2007
It can be stated that it is worthy for one to learn English only to be able to read NEW ROSE HOTEL in the original. No translation can do justice to Gibson's fresh prose. I realize that the cannon-setters might not agree, however, for me, these are the BEST 28 pages ever written in English. With Gibson SF entered its Golden Age.

All of the short stories contained are excellent. However, my favorites are all of the three Sprawl ones: JOHNY MNEMONIC, NEW ROSE HOTEL and BURNING CHROME; at par is the Soviet retro (nowadays) HINTERLANDS.

Never before or since have I came upon comparable poetic dreamscapes of futuristic noir dystopia. The images are so concentrated they just burst from the reader's mind to create a detailed alternative reality. And it is not that the Novels are diluted - they are just more of the good stuff!

My advice: read BURNING CHROME *AFTER* the famous trilogy (NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO, MONA LISA OVERDRIVE). They will help you understand the precursor ideas for the rich atmospheric world that followed.
[Do not watch the NEW ROSE HOTEL movie. Do so for JOHNY MNEMONIC neither. They do no justice to these literature gems].

Highly Recommended!

Recommended -- but with reservations., 22 Dec 2001
William Gibson is best known as the author of Neuromancer -- his first novel, which caused him to be hailed in  The Sunday Times as "the information age's resident populist prophet".
The book reviewed here is a collection of ten short stories, including his first published story Fragments of a Hologram Rose from 1977.

Gibson's style has been described as "a combination of low-life and high-tech". This collection shows how perceptive he can be in observing both. Gibson doesn't just use technology as a back-drop or to provide props; he considers the effects that developments in technology might have upon individuals and societies. In Johnny Mnemonic for example a character explains:--

"We're an information economy. They teach you that at school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified."

Gibson describes also the detail of low-life settings. In this collection there are very good descriptions of different types of bars in The Belonging Kind. He paints portraits of different characters, Deke in Dogfight, Lese in The Winter Market, with different colours and shades.

Ultimately, however, he extrapolates from a mass (or media) consciousness of the present. Gibson has interesting things to say but he is not a prophet. The future will not be the same as his stories. The Soviet Union has not dominated space research (as in Red Star, Winter Orbit), in fact it no longer exists. Many future developments will derive not from mass actions or popular consciousness, but from the work of "outsiders". Instead of looking just at what is now considered "central", perhaps he should view what is emerging at the edge....

A collection that you must not miss., 27 May 2001
This collection contains ten stories, seven of which are solo works by William Gibson and the other three are collaborations. Nine appeared previously between 1977 and 1985 and one was new for this collection.

Gibson writes hard, technical cyber-punk SF with the art of a real master of the short story genre. Good SF shorts are of course all about ideas, situations and snappy plot twists but great examples of this genre also pack in characters that you can understand and root for and worlds that come to life in your head. It is hard to do that and only a handful of writers can turn out work of this quality.

The opening shot in the book, "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those rare tales that burns its way into your head. Reading it is almost like being there watching the events unfold. The narrative makes the outlandish grunge-tech future come to life and it is easy to see how this tale inspired the making of a movie.

It is a powerful start and the rest of the book does not disappoint. From the anonymous barfly world of "The Belonging Kind", up into the dying orbit of an old Russian space station in "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and back to the seedy hacker world of "Burning Chrome" Gibson delivers a set of tales for which the phrase "assault on the senses" is no exaggeration.

The book is a fine introduction to both Gibson and the cyber-punk genre and it is a book that every SF fan should own and re-read regularly. If you like it and to want to explore similar work, I'd suggest "A Good Old Fashioned Future" by Bruce Sterling, or the "Mirrorshades" anthology.

A great collection of short stories not to be missed, 11 Oct 2000
Gibson gives his best in the hard work of recalling, fixing and arranging moments in short, moving and touchy stories. Great stories like "Burning Chrome", "Fragments of a hologram rose", "Jhonny Mnemonic" or "New Rose Hotel" show the hints of the world he unrolls in his novels, but maybe the most wonderful thing is seeing him at work on completly different styles than usual, like in the astinishing "Hinterand". A great collection, a must to every Gibson-fan.

A few nicities, a few oddities ..., 11 Jul 2006
Many of the stories are excellent, with sudden twists at the end to highlight the skill of the author in bringing you to a place that you didn't expect.

Bus Driver is a fairly easy parable, my personal favourite was Breaking the Pig, whereas Kneller's Happy Campers is a bit of a purgatorial oddity - in more ways than one.

If you fancy a change from a long novel, for a few gambits of lateral israel-inspired storytelling, then read this.

Don't waste your money, 03 Feb 2006
Despits rave reviews, this book is absolutely rubbish. Most of the stories were so short (some less than 2 pages) to have no substance at all. A couple of small sniggers was all this book could raise from me. I will not be fooled into buying anymore books by this particular author. I gave this book 1 star.... because i can't give it none!

Short and hilarious stories, 12 Aug 2005
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God is an enjoyable collection to read. Etgar Keret emerged as witty, penetrating, humurous and very knowing. He is a fresh breath of to short story writing.Short stories by Chekhov, The Usurper and Other Stories, Runaway,Union Moujik are other fine and hilarious books to read.

brilliant stories, 25 Nov 2001
This is a selection of stories taken from previous colections by Etgar Keret, but it is his first book published in English. Read it and see why Keret has become such a big name in his own coutry, and such an important role model for younger writers. The stories are short, smart funny and brilliant. Read them now and look out for the one about the pipes.

Excellent, 06 Nov 2007
I really enjoyed this book and it portrays a true reflection of what the society is going through regarding christianity.

Very Good, 26 Oct 2007
When I started read this book I wasn't sure what to expect but a few pages down the line and I couldn't put this book down. There's a lot a drama and true to life situations. Some sad bits but thats life for yah. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and now i'm reading 'i know i've been changed' by the same author.

Very good book!, 30 Nov 2005
This was the first time I read a Christian novel, and I was not disappointed by the story. This is very well-written and the more I was reading the more I wanted to know what was going to happen. Reshonda raised issues of life that few people like to deal with. This is a very honest book. Well done!

Ted Dekker does it again..., 25 Jun 2006
Another exciting tale from a brilliant writer. Quite a dark story exploring the depths of evil that reside in the human psyche.
Really good read, kept me riveted to the pages.

Christmas Spirit, 01 Dec 2002
If you have been wondering where the Christmas Spirit has gone recently, then expect to be captured by it in this superb book. What a banquet of literary expertise and wit, both classic and modern ! Here, there is something for everyone from mouth watering recipes by the original Isabelle Beeton to Rachel Ferguson’s Memoirs of a Fir Tree. Then there are Christmas stories and personal accounts from writers as diverse as Christina Rossetti , Virginia Woolf, Freya Stark, Winifred Foley and Sue Townsend.
Expect to be seduced and touched by the Norwegian writer, Cora Sandel’s romantic tale of a struggling artist’s Christmas. Furthermore there is a section on mischief for those who appreciate how difficult Christmas can be and enjoy the humour of Jenny Éclair and Janet Hills who begins with; “Before I give myself over to Christmas good will, I am making a list of the people whom I would like to murder…..”
The splendid cover aptly portrays the diversity of content; a modern angel

riding her bicycle into the twenty first century, linking Christmas Past with Christmas Now. An excellent and refreshing read.
Stephanie June Sorrell

Christmas Spirit, 21 Nov 2002
If you have been wondering where the Christmas Spirit has gone recently, then expect to be captured by it in this superb book. What a banquet of literary expertise and wit, both classic and modern !

Here, there is something for everyone from mouth watering recipes by the original Isabelle Beeton to Rachel Ferguson’s 'Memoirs of a Fir Tree'. Then there are Christmas stories and personal accounts from writers as diverse as Christina Rossetti , Virginia Woolf, Freya Stark, Winifred Foley and Sue Townsend.

Expect to be seduced and touched by the Norwegian writer, Cora Sandel’s romantic tale of a struggling artist’s Christmas. Additionally, there is a section on mischief for those who appreciate how difficult Christmas can be and enjoy the humour of Jenny Éclair and Janet Hills who begins with; “Before I give myself over to Christmas good will, I am making a list of the people whom I would like to murder…..”

The splendid cover aptly portrays the diversity of content; a modern angel riding her bicycle into the twenty first century, linking Christmas Past with Christmas Now. An excellent and refreshing read.

Very nearly a cyberpunk genre defining classic, but that crown has to go to Gibson's Neuromancer, 29 Oct 2008
Gangsters, double crosses, hustles, hallucinogenics, neural interfaces, virtual reality: elements of the past and future fused together. Burning Chrome is a drug-fuelled, high-tech, rollercoaster ride in the dark. Packed with fragmented sentences and jargon, Burning Chrome is not an easy read, but a compelling one. These stories will not be to everyone's likening. They are a difficult read, packed with unpleasant characters in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes there is a lesson to be learned, but generally only the winning matters. They are as beguiling as a car crash. In some other books, the future is bright. In Burning Chrome, it may be orange but it is dark and scary. Inhabited with gangsters committing high-tech crimes or bio-terrorism, this is not a pleasant place to be.

Gibson's aggressive poetry is brutally beautiful. The prose is fragmented; quantum. Perception jumps. Vision blurs as if through a drugged haze. Jargon real and invented beguile and bamboozle. Gibson himself, like Philip K Dick, was no stranger to narcotics and his experience is made flesh in these stories. Published in magazines between 1977 and 84, these stories came at the start of the revolution in popular computing and a sea change in science fiction. The cyberpunk stories of Gibson and his collaborators threw out the shiny futures and political dystopias, and brought in a new dystopian vision where mega-corporations and organised crime ruled (though sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference). These stories are not Star Trek, but criminals with computers; lock, stock and two smoking hard drives. The future has brought technology but it has not cured us of the sins of humanity; it has only enabled new ones.

This is classic cyberpunk in bite-sized portions.

There are No Maps For These QuickSilver Territories, 27 Sep 2007
It can be stated that it is worthy for one to learn English only to be able to read NEW ROSE HOTEL in the original. No translation can do justice to Gibson's fresh prose. I realize that the cannon-setters might not agree, however, for me, these are the BEST 28 pages ever written in English. With Gibson SF entered its Golden Age.

All of the short stories contained are excellent. However, my favorites are all of the three Sprawl ones: JOHNY MNEMONIC, NEW ROSE HOTEL and BURNING CHROME; at par is the Soviet retro (nowadays) HINTERLANDS.

Never before or since have I came upon comparable poetic dreamscapes of futuristic noir dystopia. The images are so concentrated they just burst from the reader's mind to create a detailed alternative reality. And it is not that the Novels are diluted - they are just more of the good stuff!

My advice: read BURNING CHROME *AFTER* the famous trilogy (NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO, MONA LISA OVERDRIVE). They will help you understand the precursor ideas for the rich atmospheric world that followed.
[Do not watch the NEW ROSE HOTEL movie. Do so for JOHNY MNEMONIC neither. They do no justice to these literature gems].

Highly Recommended!

Recommended -- but with reservations., 22 Dec 2001
William Gibson is best known as the author of Neuromancer -- his first novel, which caused him to be hailed in  The Sunday Times as "the information age's resident populist prophet".
The book reviewed here is a collection of ten short stories, including his first published story Fragments of a Hologram Rose from 1977.

Gibson's style has been described as "a combination of low-life and high-tech". This collection shows how perceptive he can be in observing both. Gibson doesn't just use technology as a back-drop or to provide props; he considers the effects that developments in technology might have upon individuals and societies. In Johnny Mnemonic for example a character explains:--

"We're an information economy. They teach you that at school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified."

Gibson describes also the detail of low-life settings. In this collection there are very good descriptions of different types of bars in The Belonging Kind. He paints portraits of different characters, Deke in Dogfight, Lese in The Winter Market, with different colours and shades.

Ultimately, however, he extrapolates from a mass (or media) consciousness of the present. Gibson has interesting things to say but he is not a prophet. The future will not be the same as his stories. The Soviet Union has not dominated space research (as in Red Star, Winter Orbit), in fact it no longer exists. Many future developments will derive not from mass actions or popular consciousness, but from the work of "outsiders". Instead of looking just at what is now considered "central", perhaps he should view what is emerging at the edge....

A collection that you must not miss., 27 May 2001
This collection contains ten stories, seven of which are solo works by William Gibson and the other three are collaborations. Nine appeared previously between 1977 and 1985 and one was new for this collection.

Gibson writes hard, technical cyber-punk SF with the art of a real master of the short story genre. Good SF shorts are of course all about ideas, situations and snappy plot twists but great examples of this genre also pack in characters that you can understand and root for and worlds that come to life in your head. It is hard to do that and only a handful of writers can turn out work of this quality.

The opening shot in the book, "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those rare tales that burns its way into your head. Reading it is almost like being there watching the events unfold. The narrative makes the outlandish grunge-tech future come to life and it is easy to see how this tale inspired the making of a movie.

It is a powerful start and the rest of the book does not disappoint. From the anonymous barfly world of "The Belonging Kind", up into the dying orbit of an old Russian space station in "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and back to the seedy hacker world of "Burning Chrome" Gibson delivers a set of tales for which the phrase "assault on the senses" is no exaggeration.

The book is a fine introduction to both Gibson and the cyber-punk genre and it is a book that every SF fan should own and re-read regularly. If you like it and to want to explore similar work, I'd suggest "A Good Old Fashioned Future" by Bruce Sterling, or the "Mirrorshades" anthology.

A great collection of short stories not to be missed, 11 Oct 2000
Gibson gives his best in the hard work of recalling, fixing and arranging moments in short, moving and touchy stories. Great stories like "Burning Chrome", "Fragments of a hologram rose", "Jhonny Mnemonic" or "New Rose Hotel" show the hints of the world he unrolls in his novels, but maybe the most wonderful thing is seeing him at work on completly different styles than usual, like in the astinishing "Hinterand". A great collection, a must to every Gibson-fan.

A few nicities, a few oddities ..., 11 Jul 2006
Many of the stories are excellent, with sudden twists at the end to highlight the skill of the author in bringing you to a place that you didn't expect.

Bus Driver is a fairly easy parable, my personal favourite was Breaking the Pig, whereas Kneller's Happy Campers is a bit of a purgatorial oddity - in more ways than one.

If you fancy a change from a long novel, for a few gambits of lateral israel-inspired storytelling, then read this.

Don't waste your money, 03 Feb 2006
Despits rave reviews, this book is absolutely rubbish. Most of the stories were so short (some less than 2 pages) to have no substance at all. A couple of small sniggers was all this book could raise from me. I will not be fooled into buying anymore books by this particular author. I gave this book 1 star.... because i can't give it none!

Short and hilarious stories, 12 Aug 2005
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God is an enjoyable collection to read. Etgar Keret emerged as witty, penetrating, humurous and very knowing. He is a fresh breath of to short story writing.Short stories by Chekhov, The Usurper and Other Stories, Runaway,Union Moujik are other fine and hilarious books to read.

brilliant stories, 25 Nov 2001
This is a selection of stories taken from previous colections by Etgar Keret, but it is his first book published in English. Read it and see why Keret has become such a big name in his own coutry, and such an important role model for younger writers. The stories are short, smart funny and brilliant. Read them now and look out for the one about the pipes.

Excellent, 06 Nov 2007
I really enjoyed this book and it portrays a true reflection of what the society is going through regarding christianity.

Very Good, 26 Oct 2007
When I started read this book I wasn't sure what to expect but a few pages down the line and I couldn't put this book down. There's a lot a drama and true to life situations. Some sad bits but thats life for yah. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and now i'm reading 'i know i've been changed' by the same author.

Very good book!, 30 Nov 2005
This was the first time I read a Christian novel, and I was not disappointed by the story. This is very well-written and the more I was reading the more I wanted to know what was going to happen. Reshonda raised issues of life that few people like to deal with. This is a very honest book. Well done!

Ted Dekker does it again..., 25 Jun 2006
Another exciting tale from a brilliant writer. Quite a dark story exploring the depths of evil that reside in the human psyche.
Really good read, kept me riveted to the pages.

Christmas Spirit, 01 Dec 2002
If you have been wondering where the Christmas Spirit has gone recently, then expect to be captured by it in this superb book. What a banquet of literary expertise and wit, both classic and modern ! Here, there is something for everyone from mouth watering recipes by the original Isabelle Beeton to Rachel Ferguson’s Memoirs of a Fir Tree. Then there are Christmas stories and personal accounts from writers as diverse as Christina Rossetti , Virginia Woolf, Freya Stark, Winifred Foley and Sue Townsend.
Expect to be seduced and touched by the Norwegian writer, Cora Sandel’s romantic tale of a struggling artist’s Christmas. Furthermore there is a section on mischief for those who appreciate how difficult Christmas can be and enjoy the humour of Jenny Éclair and Janet Hills who begins with; “Before I give myself over to Christmas good will, I am making a list of the people whom I would like to murder…..”
The splendid cover aptly portrays the diversity of content; a modern angel

riding her bicycle into the twenty first century, linking Christmas Past with Christmas Now. An excellent and refreshing read.
Stephanie June Sorrell

Christmas Spirit, 21 Nov 2002
If you have been wondering where the Christmas Spirit has gone recently, then expect to be captured by it in this superb book. What a banquet of literary expertise and wit, both classic and modern !

Here, there is something for everyone from mouth watering recipes by the original Isabelle Beeton to Rachel Ferguson’s 'Memoirs of a Fir Tree'. Then there are Christmas stories and personal accounts from writers as diverse as Christina Rossetti , Virginia Woolf, Freya Stark, Winifred Foley and Sue Townsend.

Expect to be seduced and touched by the Norwegian writer, Cora Sandel’s romantic tale of a struggling artist’s Christmas. Additionally, there is a section on mischief for those who appreciate how difficult Christmas can be and enjoy the humour of Jenny Éclair and Janet Hills who begins with; “Before I give myself over to Christmas good will, I am making a list of the people whom I would like to murder…..”

The splendid cover aptly portrays the diversity of content; a modern angel riding her bicycle into the twenty first century, linking Christmas Past with Christmas Now. An excellent and refreshing read.

One of the most moving things I've ever read, 26 Mar 2004
Walter Wangerin is a master storyteller. To make sense of life and faith, he tells stories. Compulsively. He is also a Christian pastor who has spent most of his working ministry in the most deprived parts of the southern USA, in communities where he has had to earn his right to be heard. This book is a compilation of his thoughts, struggles, reflections and some of the parables that he has used to put the Gospel into the language of the late 20th century. It is also one of the most moving books I have ever read.

The most memorable aspect of this book is the parables. The central stories of the Christian Gospel are transposed into the streets of the modern city. Without doing disservice to the heart of the message, these tales shine a new light on the stories of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus, showing the presence of God among the homeless, the abused, the mentally ill - the outcasts of society - and calling the rest of us to look again and see God's hand at work where we least expect it. The stories range from the sublime (the tear-jerking "Advent Monologue") to the downright ridiculous (the Uncle Remus-esque story of Moses Swope, the boy who believed EVERYTHING...), each one told with sensitivity and love, and with an astonishing - in places almost childlike - simplicity of language. Interspersed with these tales are prayers and meditations, anecdotes from the author's family life, and two or three longer, more detailed pieces taken from sermons and reflections for special occasions. In many ways these are the most moving part of the book. In one, Wangerin tells an audience of fresh-faced, middle-class, newly ordained ministers how he came down to earth with a bump at the start of his own professional ministry, and how he fought to "learn the city" and earn his right to be heard as the only white man in the congregation. In another, he cries out for Christians to re-learn the gift of telling stories, of using them to create a place in which God's love can minister and God's words teach and rebuke - a manifesto not unlike that of J.R.R. Tolkien, although made all the more poignant for Wangerin's long experience as a minister, guide and carer to the poor.

In "Ragman", Walter Wangerin has achieved something rare for a writer of "Christian books": he has produced a volume which will comfort, challenge AND uplift, which engages head and heart in equal measure with the Gospel. I don't know anyone, of the many people I have recommended this book to (or given it as a present), who hasn't been touched by it.

Touching stories to warm the soul, 06 Dec 1997
This book was intriguing and spiritually uplifting. From the beginning when I read about the Ragman that came to heal I was captured. The Easter story written as a play was moving and the to learn about the story of the Easter Lilly brought me to tears. This book is for all ages. It teaches us about Christ's unconditional love and his unfailing servanthood to us.

Very nearly a cyberpunk genre defining classic, but that crown has to go to Gibson's Neuromancer, 29 Oct 2008
Gangsters, double crosses, hustles, hallucinogenics, neural interfaces, virtual reality: elements of the past and future fused together. Burning Chrome is a drug-fuelled, high-tech, rollercoaster ride in the dark. Packed with fragmented sentences and jargon, Burning Chrome is not an easy read, but a compelling one. These stories will not be to everyone's likening. They are a difficult read, packed with unpleasant characters in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes there is a lesson to be learned, but generally only the winning matters. They are as beguiling as a car crash. In some other books, the future is bright. In Burning Chrome, it may be orange but it is dark and scary. Inhabited with gangsters committing high-tech crimes or bio-terrorism, this is not a pleasant place to be.

Gibson's aggressive poetry is brutally beautiful. The prose is fragmented; quantum. Perception jumps. Vision blurs as if through a drugged haze. Jargon real and invented beguile and bamboozle. Gibson himself, like Philip K Dick, was no stranger to narcotics and his experience is made flesh in these stories. Published in magazines between 1977 and 84, these stories came at the start of the revolution in popular computing and a sea change in science fiction. The cyberpunk stories of Gibson and his collaborators threw out the shiny futures and political dystopias, and brought in a new dystopian vision where mega-corporations and organised crime ruled (though sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference). These stories are not Star Trek, but criminals with computers; lock, stock and two smoking hard drives. The future has brought technology but it has not cured us of the sins of humanity; it has only enabled new ones.

This is classic cyberpunk in bite-sized portions.

There are No Maps For These QuickSilver Territories, 27 Sep 2007
It can be stated that it is worthy for one to learn English only to be able to read NEW ROSE HOTEL in the original. No translation can do justice to Gibson's fresh prose. I realize that the cannon-setters might not agree, however, for me, these are the BEST 28 pages ever written in English. With Gibson SF entered its Golden Age.

All of the short stories contained are excellent. However, my favorites are all of the three Sprawl ones: JOHNY MNEMONIC, NEW ROSE HOTEL and BURNING CHROME; at par is the Soviet retro (nowadays) HINTERLANDS.

Never before or since have I came upon comparable poetic dreamscapes of futuristic noir dystopia. The images are so concentrated they just burst from the reader's mind to create a detailed alternative reality. And it is not that the Novels are diluted - they are just more of the good stuff!

My advice: read BURNING CHROME *AFTER* the famous trilogy (NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO, MONA LISA OVERDRIVE). They will help you understand the precursor ideas for the rich atmospheric world that followed.
[Do not watch the NEW ROSE HOTEL movie. Do so for JOHNY MNEMONIC neither. They do no justice to these literature gems].

Highly Recommended!

Recommended -- but with reservations., 22 Dec 2001
William Gibson is best known as the author of Neuromancer -- his first novel, which caused him to be hailed in  The Sunday Times as "the information age's resident populist prophet".
The book reviewed here is a collection of ten short stories, including his first published story Fragments of a Hologram Rose from 1977.

Gibson's style has been described as "a combination of low-life and high-tech". This collection shows how perceptive he can be in observing both. Gibson doesn't just use technology as a back-drop or to provide props; he considers the effects that developments in technology might have upon individuals and societies. In Johnny Mnemonic for example a character explains:--

"We're an information economy. They teach you that at school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified."

Gibson describes also the detail of low-life settings. In this collection there are very good descriptions of different types of bars in The Belonging Kind. He paints portraits of different characters, Deke in Dogfight, Lese in The Winter Market, with different colours and shades.

Ultimately, however, he extrapolates from a mass (or media) consciousness of the present. Gibson has interesting things to say but he is not a prophet. The future will not be the same as his stories. The Soviet Union has not dominated space research (as in Red Star, Winter Orbit), in fact it no longer exists. Many future developments will derive not from mass actions or popular consciousness, but from the work of "outsiders". Instead of looking just at what is now considered "central", perhaps he should view what is emerging at the edge....

A collection that you must not miss., 27 May 2001
This collection contains ten stories, seven of which are solo works by William Gibson and the other three are collaborations. Nine appeared previously between 1977 and 1985 and one was new for this collection.

Gibson writes hard, technical cyber-punk SF with the art of a real master of the short story genre. Good SF shorts are of course all about ideas, situations and snappy plot twists but great examples of this genre also pack in characters that you can understand and root for and worlds that come to life in your head. It is hard to do that and only a handful of writers can turn out work of this quality.

The opening shot in the book, "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those rare tales that burns its way into your head. Reading it is almost like being there watching the events unfold. The narrative makes the outlandish grunge-tech future come to life and it is easy to see how this tale inspired the making of a movie.

It is a powerful start and the rest of the book does not disappoint. From the anonymous barfly world of "The Belonging Kind", up into the dying orbit of an old Russian space station in "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and back to the seedy hacker world of "Burning Chrome" Gibson delivers a set of tales for which the phrase "assault on the senses" is no exaggeration.

The book is a fine introduction to both Gibson and the cyber-punk genre and it is a book that every SF fan should own and re-read regularly. If you like it and to want to explore similar work, I'd suggest "A Good Old Fashioned Future" by Bruce Sterling, or the "Mirrorshades" anthology.

A great collection of short stories not to be missed, 11 Oct 2000
Gibson gives his best in the hard work of recalling, fixing and arranging moments in short, moving and touchy stories. Great stories like "Burning Chrome", "Fragments of a hologram rose", "Jhonny Mnemonic" or "New Rose Hotel" show the hints of the world he unrolls in his novels, but maybe the most wonderful thing is seeing him at work on completly different styles than usual, like in the astinishing "Hinterand". A great collection, a must to every Gibson-fan.

A few nicities, a few oddities ..., 11 Jul 2006
Many of the stories are excellent, with sudden twists at the end to highlight the skill of the author in bringing you to a place that you didn't expect.

Bus Driver is a fairly easy parable, my personal favourite was Breaking the Pig, whereas Kneller's Happy Campers is a bit of a purgatorial oddity - in more ways than one.

If you fancy a change from a long novel, for a few gambits of lateral israel-inspired storytelling, then read this.

Don't waste your money, 03 Feb 2006
Despits rave reviews, this book is absolutely rubbish. Most of the stories were so short (some less than 2 pages) to have no substance at all. A couple of small sniggers was all this book could raise from me. I will not be fooled into buying anymore books by this particular author. I gave this book 1 star.... because i can't give it none!

Short and hilarious stories, 12 Aug 2005
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God is an enjoyable collection to read. Etgar Keret emerged as witty, penetrating, humurous and very knowing. He is a fresh breath of to short story writing.Short stories by Chekhov, The Usurper and Other Stories, Runaway,Union Moujik are other fine and hilarious books to read.

brilliant stories, 25 Nov 2001
This is a selection of stories taken from previous colections by Etgar Keret, but it is his first book published in English. Read it and see why Keret has become such a big name in his own coutry, and such an important role model for younger writers. The stories are short, smart funny and brilliant. Read them now and look out for the one about the pipes.

Excellent, 06 Nov 2007
I really enjoyed this book and it portrays a true reflection of what the society is going through regarding christianity.

Very Good, 26 Oct 2007
When I started read this book I wasn't sure what to expect but a few pages down the line and I couldn't put this book down. There's a lot a drama and true to life situations. Some sad bits but thats life for yah. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and now i'm reading 'i know i've been changed' by the same author.

Very good book!, 30 Nov 2005
This was the first time I read a Christian novel, and I was not disappointed by the story. This is very well-written and the more I was reading the more I wanted to know what was going to happen. Reshonda raised issues of life that few people like to deal with. This is a very honest book. Well done!

Ted Dekker does it again..., 25 Jun 2006
Another exciting tale from a brilliant writer. Quite a dark story exploring the depths of evil that reside in the human psyche.
Really good read, kept me riveted to the pages.

Christmas Spirit, 01 Dec 2002
If you have been wondering where the Christmas Spirit has gone recently, then expect to be captured by it in this superb book. What a banquet of literary expertise and wit, both classic and modern ! Here, there is something for everyone from mouth watering recipes by the original Isabelle Beeton to Rachel Ferguson’s Memoirs of a Fir Tree. Then there are Christmas stories and personal accounts from writers as diverse as Christina Rossetti , Virginia Woolf, Freya Stark, Winifred Foley and Sue Townsend.
Expect to be seduced and touched by the Norwegian writer, Cora Sandel’s romantic tale of a struggling artist’s Christmas. Furthermore there is a section on mischief for those who appreciate how difficult Christmas can be and enjoy the humour of Jenny Éclair and Janet Hills who begins with; “Before I give myself over to Christmas good will, I am making a list of the people whom I would like to murder…..”
The splendid cover aptly portrays the diversity of content; a modern angel

riding her bicycle into the twenty first century, linking Christmas Past with Christmas Now. An excellent and refreshing read.
Stephanie June Sorrell

Christmas Spirit, 21 Nov 2002
If you have been wondering where the Christmas Spirit has gone recently, then expect to be captured by it in this superb book. What a banquet of literary expertise and wit, both classic and modern !

Here, there is something for everyone from mouth watering recipes by the original Isabelle Beeton to Rachel Ferguson’s 'Memoirs of a Fir Tree'. Then there are Christmas stories and personal accounts from writers as diverse as Christina Rossetti , Virginia Woolf, Freya Stark, Winifred Foley and Sue Townsend.

Expect to be seduced and touched by the Norwegian writer, Cora Sandel’s romantic tale of a struggling artist’s Christmas. Additionally, there is a section on mischief for those who appreciate how difficult Christmas can be and enjoy the humour of Jenny Éclair and Janet Hills who begins with; “Before I give myself over to Christmas good will, I am making a list of the people whom I would like to murder…..”

The splendid cover aptly portrays the diversity of content; a modern angel riding her bicycle into the twenty first century, linking Christmas Past with Christmas Now. An excellent and refreshing read.

One of the most moving things I've ever read, 26 Mar 2004
Walter Wangerin is a master storyteller. To make sense of life and faith, he tells stories. Compulsively. He is also a Christian pastor who has spent most of his working ministry in the most deprived parts of the southern USA, in communities where he has had to earn his right to be heard. This book is a compilation of his thoughts, struggles, reflections and some of the parables that he has used to put the Gospel into the language of the late 20th century. It is also one of the most moving books I have ever read.

The most memorable aspect of this book is the parables. The central stories of the Christian Gospel are transposed into the streets of the modern city. Without doing disservice to the heart of the message, these tales shine a new light on the stories of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus, showing the presence of God among the homeless, the abused, the mentally ill - the outcasts of society - and calling the rest of us to look again and see God's hand at work where we least expect it. The stories range from the sublime (the tear-jerking "Advent Monologue") to the downright ridiculous (the Uncle Remus-esque story of Moses Swope, the boy who believed EVERYTHING...), each one told with sensitivity and love, and with an astonishing - in places almost childlike - simplicity of language. Interspersed with these tales are prayers and meditations, anecdotes from the author's family life, and two or three longer, more detailed pieces taken from sermons and reflections for special occasions. In many ways these are the most moving part of the book. In one, Wangerin tells an audience of fresh-faced, middle-class, newly ordained ministers how he came down to earth with a bump at the start of his own professional ministry, and how he fought to "learn the city" and earn his right to be heard as the only white man in the congregation. In another, he cries out for Christians to re-learn the gift of telling stories, of using them to create a place in which God's love can minister and God's words teach and rebuke - a manifesto not unlike that of J.R.R. Tolkien, although made all the more poignant for Wangerin's long experience as a minister, guide and carer to the poor.

In "Ragman", Walter Wangerin has achieved something rare for a writer of "Christian books": he has produced a volume which will comfort, challenge AND uplift, which engages head and heart in equal measure with the Gospel. I don't know anyone, of the many people I have recommended this book to (or given it as a present), who hasn't been touched by it.

Touching stories to warm the soul, 06 Dec 1997
This book was intriguing and spiritually uplifting. From the beginning when I read about the Ragman that came to heal I was captured. The Easter story written as a play was moving and the to learn about the story of the Easter Lilly brought me to tears. This book is for all ages. It teaches us about Christ's unconditional love and his unfailing servanthood to us.

Beautiful, and non-religious, 28 Oct 2008
I want to say straight away, I'm not a young earth creationist, and I don't believe in a literal 6-day creation. However, Havah: The Story of Eve makes no attempt to answer those unanswerable questions. The tale begins with Eve's "birth" - the days/thousands of years prior to that aren't touched upon in the least, so whether you're YEC, OEC or a theistic evolutionist your beliefs won't butt heads with anything here.

How well known is the story of Adam and Eve? How *iconic*, even. Every child born in an English-speaking country knows about Adam and Eve, and the Garden of Eden and the "apple" and the snake. By the same token, how much thought do we actually given them? What did they feel seconds before eating the forbidden fruit? What did they do the first hours after their exile? Did they blame one another? Blame God?

I always think there's a fine line between adding to the Bible, and extrapolating: this is very much the latter, turned into a work of "fiction". As with "Demon" (Lee's debut), the dots she joins are firmly Biblical - it's the lines *between* them that meander and wander and give flesh to the story.

Here, Kayin and Hevel come alive: they're no longer the 2-dimensional brothers you don't really know; they become real, breathing people, and despite knowing how tragically it ends, you'll find yourself hoping the outcome will be different.

Something Havah made me realise is how vitally important dialogue is in any book. I initially wondered how readable it would be with just a cast of 2 but, somehow, Lee manages it magnificently. It never gets dull, even when Adam and Eve go through phases of not speaking to one another. In that respect, I suppose it's vaguely reminiscent of the "Clan of the Cave Bear (Earth's Children)" series by Jean M Auel. As with those books, as other characters are introduced, the story opens up and grows larger, but it's perhaps at its most beautiful early on when there's just the two of them, Adam and Eve, struggling to survive and comprehend.

Eden is described with mesmerising detail and wonder: it's a place with azure water where the air smells of apricots, jasmine and honey. Some believe that the Garden of Eden was in Iran (in theory, it's both geographically and Biblically sound) and others believe it was a spiritual place. Either way, it's described with such flair and detail, it made me ache to be there.

Lee has an ability to share the gospel without ever appearing forceful or pompous, and her way with words is awesome. She can say in just a few words what most writers can barely manage with entire pages. Her prose are full of colour and texture and scent and they frequently flow like poetry.

Realistically, I think Havah will mostly appeal to women of faith - be it Christian or Jewish. But, by the same token, it will have enormous value to those who are investigating the faith, and are a little stuck on Adam and Eve. It also chronicles, with great subtlety, the way in which innocence is slowly lost. Not once does Lee sign-post it: it's all in how the characters develop, but with hindsight, it's fascinating to look back and analyse how they became who they become, simply by living their lives.

"Demon" had me unsure as to whether to give it 4 or 5 stars but, while that story had wider appeal and was more modern and "exciting", this doesn't even need any thought: it's an easy 5 stars.

Very nearly a cyberpunk genre defining classic, but that crown has to go to Gibson's Neuromancer, 29 Oct 2008
Gangsters, double crosses