practicality

I will shamelessly pimp out his short story collection, Burning Chrome, because I love it and it's less headache-inducing than trying to start off with one of the novels (his writing can be a bit...dense, in that there's so much information and detail crammed in it's hard to process everything on the first read). The Turks and Midgar are very much in the vein of his classic cyberpunk works. I was actually thinking earlier about how much my Tseng would like one of the locations described in Burning Chrome, the Killing Floor. It's described as being like someone threaded wire through a junkyard and suspended it - huge chunks of metal, sheets of plywood, all on massive coil springs, randomly wired with pick-ups and amps. When it's in use, huge subwoofers pump out a steady bass beat - the rest of the sound is made by the motion of the combatants as they move across the floor.