This blogpost is about the House of Blue Lights in Burning Chrome. The Burning Chrome master blogpost is here.

House Of Blue Lights

The House of Blue Lights is a neuroelectronic sex shop, a sort of brothel of the mind. It’s revealed that Chrome, the person/thing they are trying to “burn” down, is the owner, as opposed to just a figure head for The Boys. It’s is somewhat notable that Gibson doesn’t use a MegaCorp for the figures that are supposedly pulling the strings. Instead it’s “The Boys.” More of a gang than a transnational corporation. Where’s the Yakuza?

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So, the House of Blue Lights is some sort of futuristic den of prostitution but Gibson never quite clears up how the mechanics works. A shift for one of the girls working three is described as “three hours in an approximation of REM sleep” and how “the customers never complained that she was faking it, because the orgasms were real.”

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I take issue with this vague talking around the issue instead of stating what’s really going on. There’s no real point to hide the ball unless the writer himself doesn’t have a clear vision of the mechanics of the setup.

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Here’s what I picture: a guy (maybe more than one) sitting in a chair separated from the sex worker by some glass window. Both the girl and the customer are hooked up to some electronic apparatus via wires so that they feel the orgasm – the orgasms are real – but there is no physical touching.

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The commercialization of sex without anything physically happening is very cyberpunk. But I could be wrong. Maybe my image is wrong. Gibson really should have been more specific and precise. I despise vague writing, because the point of reading a novel is to see a very particular artistic vision in an artistic medium that can be more detailed and specific than any other medium.

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To say that “Well Zeke, Gibson doesn’t explain everything and spoon feed the reader,” is a horrible cop out. Not explaining everything is a virtue when the writer wants to minimize the distance between the reader and the story. “Info dumping” can often read like the novel is behind a thick piece of museum glass. But that isn’t what’s going on in Burning Chrome.

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First, please keep in mind that Burning Chrome is very accessible. It is recommended to people who find Neuromancer a little too hard to follow, as a lot of the same ideas and characters populate both stories. So there’s no reason to hide the ball.

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Second, Gibson spends a considerable amount of time explaining everything else about the House of Blue Lights. It’s “hushed corridors” and “tacky decorative waterfall” are mentioned as how the bouncer doesn’t like the look of Automatic Jack but lets him in anyways because everyone’s just a wallet. So given these details there really is no justification for the “hide the ball” antics about how everything really works.

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I do like the name though. “House of Blue Lights” recalls the “Red Light” district of a seedy city, except the blue implies that something futuristic – like an electronic version of Amsterdam’s sex stalls. The reader can get that from just the name itself.

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Despite my complaints, Burning Chrome remains a defining work of art. And it is when Automatic Jack discusses his personal trip to the House of Blue Lights that we get the famous line about “the street finds its own use for things.” Absolutely worth reading and thinking over each detail.

THE LAST BLONDE

I wrote a cyberpunk story that applies the familiar ethos of the genre to a fresh setting. Instead of in a seedy city in the North East of the US, it takes place in the Mid-West in a rural town that died a long time ago. It’s called THE LAST BLONDE. You can find it at www.blackflagliterature.com