If what hooked you in Burning Chrome was how a single story could slam you with a whole future—like the surgical cool of “Johnny Mnemonic” or the cosmic dread of “Hinterlands”—you’ll love Bacigalupi’s sharp, self-contained futures. Stories like “The People of Sand and Slag” and “The Calorie Man” deliver that same compact gut punch: ruined ecologies, biotech edge, and hustlers making brutal choices, each tale landing with the immediacy and afterglow Gibson’s shorts are famous for.

Miss the cold-blooded betrayals and body-mod violence that pulse through Burning Chrome—from the slick corporate treachery of “New Rose Hotel” to Molly’s razor-edged lethality in “Johnny Mnemonic”? Altered Carbon drops you into Takeshi Kovacs’s hunt through a future where consciousness gets resleeved, yakuza and megacorps call the shots, and every alley fight or interrogation feels as sharp and bloody as a back-alley clinic job in the Sprawl.

If you were drawn to the hustlers and compromised loyalties in “Burning Chrome”—Automatic Jack pulling one last job with Bobby Quine, then paying for it—Marîd Audran will feel instantly familiar. In the Budayeen’s labyrinth of moddy-chip identities and crime-boss favors, Marîd maneuvers through vice, obligation, and survival, every choice a shade of gray, every ally a potential knife in the ribs—very much the moral temperature of Gibson’s underworld.

If the way cyberspace in Burning Chrome feels half-ritual, half-break-in thrilled you—the hot ICE, the ghostly presence of simstim stars like Rikki aiming for the dream—Synners channels that same charged, almost mystical current. As Gina, Visual Mark, and a crew of media hackers push neural interfaces past safe limits, the network itself begins to act like a living spell gone wrong, turning every jack-in into a risk with consequences beyond the body.

If you loved how Burning Chrome saturates every page with lived-in details—the zaibatsu shadow, the street slang, the sense that tech permeates every storefront and backroom—The Diamond Age offers that same density. Following Nell and the illicit Primer through nanotech-saturated cityscapes and clashing subcultures (neo-Victorians, hackers, and street kids), it builds a tactile world where the tech and the social fabric are inseparable, just like Gibson’s Sprawl.