This blogpost is about the character Rikki Wildside in Burning Chrome. The Burning Chrome master blogpost is here.

Rikki Wildside: Skin Deep And Paper THin

Rikki is 19 and apparently a bar girl. Bobby Quine, the console cowboy, meets her in the bar, the Gentleman Loser. He takes her home to his apartment that he shares with the narrator, Automatic Jack. Bobby isn’t trying to “pull” a girl from the bar manosphere style. Instead, he’s looking for a good luck charm and apparently only young women can give him good luck.

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We first meet her when Bobby takes her home to the apartment he shares with Jack. Jack’s description of her is telling: “Tall, 19 or maybe 20, and she definitely had the goods.” “Definitely had the goods” seems to be Gibson-speak for “she was beautiful.” There’s a missed opportunity here. Gibson wants to let the reader know that she is beautiful without thinking through why Jack finds her beautiful. “She definitely had the goods” is also not a natural way of describing a pretty girl that just walked into a man’s life.

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Surely, he notices something more specific about her physical features. It’s completely unnatural that Gibson doesn’t have Jack mention her breasts, or ass, or waist, or face. The first thing Jack notices is her freckles. Come on. Who gets an erection from freckles?

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But it’s not just the freckles. Gibson describes her eyes as amber or French coffee. He then describes how her jeans are rolled up halfway up her calves and how her red belt matches her sandals. None of this is what a man who just saw a 19 year old “who had the goods” would focus on.

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Beyond the sexless description of Rikki is how much description there is. The Finn is not physically described. Bobby is only described as possessing a young-old face. Jack is not described. But Rikki is described extensively in strange ways. In that way, the story a throwback to 1940s noir where the girl is primarily the sex object and doesn’t really do anything herself except be the object of desire of the two main male characters. You never see that in contemporary work, so it’s almost refreshing.

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Molly Millions Isn’t A Sex Object

I can’t picture Molly Millions as just a hot women hanging around a couple of genius hackers playing the girlfriend part. If she was just Case’s or Johnny’s girlfriend she wouldn’t be interesting. She’s a totally different character than Rikki. The only argument is that Rikki was a young naive girl and as time went on she got worldly and cynical and turned into Molly.

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That’s possible. But to credit that theory the writer would need to show that transformation. The transformation simply can’t be assumed. And Gibson has never shown that. There’s no Molly Millions prequel for what ever reason. You would think there’s a story there. Especially in a “the future is female” environment where traditional sci-fi characters are routinely swapped with characters who are non-male and/or non-white. But he’s never given us that.

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What Gibson does give us is that Rikki gets some cyberware in her eyes and of coarse Molly has her famous mirror eyes. So that’s the connection people who think Rikki is just a younger Molly Millions. But there really isn’t anything special about cybernetic eyes. We see the same thing in Johnny Mnemonic. It’s basically a trope of the genre. With the eyes being “the window to the soul”, if you want to show a world that where technology has supplanted technology, you show cybernetic eyes.

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So, to answer my question: No, Rikki isn’t Molly Millions. They’re polar opposites.

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You can read my stab at the cyberpunk genre by reading THE LAST BLONDE at blackflagliterature.com