Monday, April 16, 2012

forgotten expectations...met

To be completely honest, this section sort of embodies every part of taking this class that I was afraid of.  I did not find Burning Chrome to be interesting by any means. It seemed to take every bit of a scifi movie that I don't like, and put it together. I can by all means handle a movie taking place in space, or dealing with robots or computers, but when I am reading just a few pages into a world that someone has created with hardly any room for explanation as to how it got there...needless to say I had a very hard time keeping up with what Gibson was putting down.  Concepts were already very bizarre and outlandish before the reader "arrives" if you will, and I felt nothing but lost the whole time. The story barely seemed to have any huge point beyond being an extremely detailed and simultaneously unfinished description of the way things are done in the future. A flimsy love story acted as a little bit of a filler. My opinion is that Gibson took off more than he could chew, and thought that he would rely on his overly eccentric and rambling storytelling to pull it all together.
Though I did not enjoy this story, reading it did bring to light a lot of things that stylistically I will be sure to avoid, including an overgrown plot line and too much description that ultimately leads to nowhere.
Something else that disappointed me about this story was that it was a reminder of everything I originally thought this class was going to be all about, and ended up being happy when I realized it wasn't. My typical thought of science fiction had been one of every story only consisting of crazy futuristic, electronically scary worlds. For a long time, I had learned this wasn't the case, that the "scientific" aspect of a scifi story could be as minute as a new procedure and its effects on mankind. This story returned me to my original stereotypic thoughts that I had been happy to break away from.

No comments:

Post a Comment