Burning Chrome Quotes

Hell of a world we live in, huh? (...) But it could be worse, huh?" "That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be perfect.

It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.

You are exhibiting symptoms of urban singles angst. There are cures for this. Drink up. Go.

Swallow future Spit out hope Burn your face Upon the chrome

if poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters.

Yeah, it's so popular it's almost legal. The customers are torn between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time, which has probably always been the name of that particular game, even before we had the neuroelectronics to enable them to have it both ways.

For so long considered a second-rate category to other writing genres, Science Fiction should be allotted its true place in literature. The reason Science Fiction is so important is because SF authors create the future. They bring through ideas, technology, and new thought, put it all down in written and spoken word, and then send it out into mass consciousness. When enough people (a critical mass) think about and truly consider the plausibility of a concept, it becomes reality. Think William Gibson, who in 1982's "Burning Chrome" coined "cyberspace". Few grasped the concept at the time, but as the internet took hold in the 1990's, we not only had a word to describe our experience, we had a definition and an understanding, as well. Coincidence?

Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s just no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil, if she hadn’t been brought up on The Bionic Man and all those Star Trek reruns.

...I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep.

It's the long finger of Big Night, the darkness that feeds the muttering damned to the gentle white maw of Wards.

The sound it made was like a world ending, like the wires that hold heaven snapping and coiling across the sky

The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming.

Nothing is as American as these big block monsters made of Detroit pig iron. In its day, this car represented everything that was right about this country. Damn near every piece of it was produced here, from the steel in the frame, to the switches behind the dash, to the scoop popping through the hood, to the real chrome on the fender. They’re pure America; arrogant, brash, and defiant as hell. You look at one and it pulls on you. Every drop of rebellion in your soul rises to the top.

Number 99 was an eviscerated ceramics plant. During the war a succession of blazing explosions had burst among the stock of thousands of chemical glazes, fused them, and splashed them into a wild rainbow reproduction of a lunar crater. Great splotches of magenta, violet, bice green, burnt umber, and chrome yellow were burned into the stone walls. Long streams of orange, crimson, and imperial purple had erupted through windows and doors to streak the streets and surrounding ruins with slashing brush strokes. This became the Rainbow House of Chooka Frood.

I was learning to map my own course and determine my own destination now that my children were no longer a home. A fire burned within my soul, igniting possibilities I previously only dreamed for myself. I was choosing to feather my empty nest with leather and chrome, not a second-hand lover.

Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep—he never slept lying down, now—he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily. . . . Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.

Imagine an alien, Fox said, who's come here to identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has s look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form. Not the Edge lecture again, I said.

What happened to your arm?" she asked me one night in the Gentleman Loser, the three of us drinking at a small table in a corner. Hang-gliding," I said, "accident." Hang-gliding over a wheatfield," said Bobby, "place called Kiev. Our Jack's just hanging there in the dark, under a Nightwing parafoil, with fifty kilos of radar jammed between his legs, and some Russian asshole accidentally burns his arm off with a laser." I don't remember how I changed the subject, but I did. I was still telling myself that it wasn't Rikki who getting to me, but what Bobby was doing with her. I'd known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep. I didn't like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it only made it worse. He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I'd seen it happen a dozen times before. He might as well have had next printed across his sunglasses in green Day-Glo capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser. I knew what he did to them. He turned them into emblems, sigils on the map of his hustler' s life, navigation beacons he could follow through a sea of bars and neon. What else did he have to steer by? He didn't love money, in and of itself , not enough to follow its lights. He wouldn't work for power over other people; he hated the responsibility it brings. He had some basic pride in his skill, but that was never enough to keep him pushing. So he made do with women. When Rikki showed up, he needed one in the worst way. He was fading fast, and smart money was already whispering that the edge was off his game. He needed that one big score, and soon, because he didn't know any other kind of life, and all his clocks were set for hustler's time, calibrated in risk and adrenaline and that supernal dawn calm that comes when every move's proved right and a sweet lump of someone else's credit clicks into your own account.

bike was old and loud and smelled like something was burning when he rode it, but it was also loaded with chrome, its tank was a sweet cobalt blue, and with the detachable windshield and leather saddlebags that came with it, it was in shape enough to carry him out onto the road all over again.

He did something with his mouth that approximated a grin. “Bein’ followed, you.” Far off, down in Nighttown, a water vendor cried his trade.

The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration.

Nighttown, because the Pit’s inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own firmament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles,

El ascensor que me esperaba para llevarme al Cielo podía ser la mejor toma de Hollywood de una caja para momias Bauhaus: un sarcófago angosto, vertical, con una tapa acrílica transparente

...era como si Dios revocara la ley de gravedad cuando tienes que cargar una maleta pesada por un corredor de aeropuerto de diez manzanas de largo.

Somos manchas vivas de aceite empujadas por pasillos de sombra

there was coffee. Life would go on.

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 .

he was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin’s point of view he might have seemed like something less.

one can’t really enjoy what science fiction does without being able to recognize the point at which the imaginary lifts off from the known.

subgenres are products of the writers’ urgent necessity to avoid tangling with a realistic

I knew, somehow, that the city behind me was Tucson—a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, entirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me.

She was talking about those odds and ends of “futuristic” Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing; the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels.

And then you pushed through into a dim space inhabited by a faintly confusing sense of the half-dozen other bars that had tried and failed in the same room under different managements.

Fox was quick to see how we could use you, but not sharp enough to credit you with ambition. But then he never lay all night with you on the beach at Kamakura, never listened to your nightmares, never heard an entire imagined childhood shift under those stars, shift and roll over, your child’s mouth opening to reveal some fresh past, and always the one, you swore, that was really and finally the truth.

hoi polloi.

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. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible.

Navy stuff,” she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. “Navy stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name’s Jones. I think you’d better meet him. He’s a junkie, though. So we’ll have to take him something.” “A junkie?” “A dolphin.

nothing acquires quite as rapid or peculiar a patina of age as an imaginary future.

Because she was dead, and I’d let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I’d helped her get that way. And because I knew she’d phone me, in the morning.

Science fiction tends to behave like a species of history pointing in the opposite direction, up the timeline rather than back. But you can’t draw imaginary future histories without a map of the past that your readers will accept as their own.

Coretti didn’t know how to dress. Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease. His ex-wife told him he dressed like a Martian; that he didn’t look as though he belonged anywhere in the city. He hadn’t liked her saying that, because it was true.

He laughed. "They don't understand. We know these hills, and we are comfortable here." There was something about the way the old man said the word "comfortable." It had a different meaning--not the comfort of big houses or rich food or even clean streets, but the comfort of belonging with the land, and the peace of being with these hills. But the special meaning the old man had given to the English word was burned away the glare of the sun on tin cans and broken glass, blinding reflections off the mirrors and chrome of the wrecked cars in the dump below.

But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn’s opinion of what I was already thinking of as my “sighting” rattled endlessly, through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts.

Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations.

Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way.

true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of “futuristic” Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing;

trash fires gutter in steel canisters around the Market. The snow still falls and kids huddle over the flames like arthritic crows, hopping from foot to foot, wind whipping their dark coats. Up in Fairview’s arty slum-tumble, someone’s laundry has frozen solid on the line, pink squares of bedsheet standing out against the background dinge and the confusion of satellite dishes and solar panels. Some ecologist’s eggbeater windmill goes round and round, round and round, giving a whirling finger to the Hydro rates.

THE OLD CAR WAS SUNK TO THE BUMPERS WHEN I DISCOVERED IT, but my first thought was how good it would be to sleep in there and hear the rain drumming on steel rather than splattering against our tattered old tarp. I was Maggie back then. Maggie, the name my parents gave me. A nice name. But these weren’t nice times. We were tired and hungry, and the GreyDevil bonfires were burning brighter and the solar bear howls were getting closer, and every morning as I strapped my SpitStick across my back and set out to scavenge, I found myself thinking I needed a better name. A stronger name. I mean, the name Maggie was fine, it just seemed kinda underpowered. So when I scrubbed the moss from the side of that old car overlooking Goldmine Gully and saw the chrome letters—Ford Falcon—I climbed up on the hood and stood there with my steel-toed boots planted wide and I wedged my fists on my hips and I announced that Maggie was yesterday, and from this day forward I would answer only to Ford Falcon. Ford, because we had a lot of rivers to cross. Falcon, because, well, if you have a lot of rivers to cross, a pair of wings can’t hurt, and then once you get across the river it’s likely you will need sharp eyes and an even sharper beak. Yes. I know. I named myself after an old dead car. Worse yet, it’s not even a cool car. It’s a station wagon. Station wagons were how parents hauled kids around during the time between covered wagons and minivans. These days you won’t see a minivan unless it’s being pulled by a horse, and even horses are hard to come by. But if you see me you will know me because I wear a vest made from the hide of a beast that tried to kill me and lost. I skinned that beast myself, and also I skinned the lettering from that old dead car and stitched it to the vest across my shoulder blades using copper wire so that in polished chrome the world can read my name and know it: Ford Falcon.

I understood Fox's late-night habit of emptying his wallet, shuffling through his identification. He'd lay the pieces out in different patterns, rearrange them, wait for a picture to form. I knew what he was looking for. You did the same thing with your childhoods, [Sandii]. In New Rose, tonight, I choose from your deck of pasts

At last count, eight-hundred and fifty-nine travelers had stepped off Trans-Continental Airlines at Sky Harbor International Airport, Phoenix, Arizona, at high noon in Mid-August without sunglasses. No one has ever done it twice. The desert sun, at high noon in Mid-August, rains down a torrent of silver needles. The sky burns white. The mountains that ring the city - Maricopas, White Tanks, Superstitions - flatten into dusty, two-dimensional mounds. Desert plants turn pale. Crawling, slithering, running creatures surrender to the heat and hide. The air shimmers on the horizon and flows in sluggish currents along the airport tarmac. Tires go soft. The odor of melting tar lies heavy along the ground. Light explodes in tinsel stars from moving glass and chrome. Phoenicians huddle indoors around their air conditioners and wait for the time of long shadows. Sky Harbor International Airport, Phoenix, Arizona, at high noon in mid-August is a white-hot Hell.

It was one of those nights, I quickly decided, when you slip into an alternate continuum, a city that looks exactly like the one where you live, except for the peculiar difference that it contains not one person you love or know or have even spoken to before.

La matriz se pliega a mi alrededor como un truco de origami

Slowly, fearfully, I crept into the kitchen. The gas-smell burned my nostrils. It hadn't been on long enough to fill the room and spill out to the rest of the house. But its intent was clear: my mother was sitting on a chrome dinette chair, legs crossed at the ankles, her arms dropped down her sides toward the floor, as if in submission to her impending death. (The Women in Me: How They Helped Me Survive and Thrive, p. 13)