This blogpost is about the character of Finn the Fence in William Gibson’s Burning Chrome. For the master blogpost of Burning Chrome see here.

Finn the Fence – what A Name

Finn is a fence. He runs a marketplace of stolen goods. He is a major character in Neuromancer but he plays a small but vital role here in Burning Chrome. We meet him when Jack needs to buy some “hot software.” Finn – like any good salesman – immediately tries to sell Jack a gun, even though Jack doesn’t need a gun. Jack needs some software.

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Finn only has one piece of software. He got it off some “bridge-and-tunnel guys from Jersey.” Try to picture Tony Soprano in a cyberpunk movie. It fits actually, I think. It feels weird because you’d have to take the mobster out of Jersey – so it feels like a fish out of water. But Soprano would thrive in a world of hackers and stolen goods and freely available guns. Where the only thing that matters – the only thing that is real – is the next payment. There won’t be envelopes full of cash, because money is digital/virtual, but Soprano would do just fine in a cyberpunk world.

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So, it turns out the software is stolen from someone’s wallet and sold to Finn the fence. Along with this diskette that contains the software, the thieves from Jersey dropped off the victims’ Belgian passport and watch made by a German car company (Porsche). This is where the name comes in.

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“Finn” of coarse makes one think of Finland. So imagine the scene of a Finnish guy in some dilapidated mall stall selling the loot from some Belgian guy’s pockets including some killer software program and a watch from Germany. It’s the ultimate scene showing all-powerful borderless capitalism. This is what tech CEOs imagine America to be when the argue for importing infinity Indians. The perfect depressing marketplace, where people are just names on a spreadsheet completely replaceable.

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The final kicker is that Finn isn’t described at all. There is no physical description of what he looks like. He’s just a faceless merchant selling stolen goods from every country on Earth. I didn’t catch that detail until I read the story about 10 times, but it’s a vitally important detail and clearly intentional. Especially because Gibson loves to describe people in unique ways (Chrome’s “heart shaped face” for instance).

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To me this scene of Jack buying the software is much more “cyberpunk” than all the scenes of actually burning Chrome down in the Matrix. Forget “cyberspace.” The real heart of the story is down here in the middle of some pile of junk next to shelves stacked “with old skin magazines.”

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We’ll meet Finn again in Neuromancer. Can’t wait.

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Check out my cyberpunk short story, THE LAST BLONDE, at www.blackflagliterature.com