47 pages • 1 hour read
William GibsonBurning Chrome
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 6 Summary: “Red Star, Winter Orbit”
The elderly Colonel Yuri Vasilevich Korolev works on the Russian-American Kosmograd space station network. Korolev has an illustrious past: He was the first human on Mars. Now, however, he is retired from service and essentially redundant, crippled with an “arthritic hand” with a wrist “bird-bone thin from calcium loss” (84).
Korolev serves to link the military and research aspects of the space station network. However, the United States has been subsumed by the Soviet superpower, rendering the military arm of the network unnecessary. There are plans to close the station entirely on account of trumped-up charges of illegal “trafficking in jazz and pornography” and American broadcasts (92). Korolev protests these charges as ridiculous and threatens to pull his honorary rank and speak with officials to save the station.
Korolev is punished for speaking out. After spending many years in low-gravity orbit in space, Korolev’s body has changed so much that he is unable to return to Earth. Upset, he hatches a plan to help other crew members rebelling against the plan to close the station to escape and get to Japan. Their escape capsule is attacked, but the defectors in turn use it to attack the space station, eradicating the military crew in the process. As a result, Korolev is trapped alone in the station. To his surprise, some Americans turn up and ask if he wants to join them as they improve the station not “for the sake of some government, some army brass, a bunch of pen pushers” (107), but rather for a “frontier.”
Story 6 Analysis
Like the preceding story, “Hinterlands,” “Red Star, Winter Orbit” depicts the crew of a space station in a critical situation. Collaboratively written with sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, the story shifts emphasis from individual psychology to international competition, although it revisits the concept of the Fear. Written at the tail end of the mid-20th century Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, “Red Star, Winter Orbit” meditates on a hypothetical situation in which the Soviet Union emerges as victorious.
At the time the story was written, manned space flight was less than 30 years old, but Gibson’s text imagines a near future in which networks of space stations have been in place for some time, and it poses attendant questions. For instance, what would it be like for a crewmember to have been on a low-gravity space station for so long that their body is unable to readapt to Earth, like Korolev? Once again, Gibson’s fiction subverts classic tropes of science fiction; old Korolev replaces the youthful, virile hero of Gernsback-era science fiction stories. At the opening of the story, he is vulnerable, strapped to a toilet and dealing with arthritic pain after “dreaming of winter and gravity. Young again” (84). The tone of “Red Star, Winter Orbit” substitutes uncertainty for the bold spirit of conquest and progress found in many of those classic stories.
While “Red Star, Winter Orbit” on one level explores fears embedded in the power struggles of the Space Race, including the risk of Soviet takeovers of America and vice versa, on a deeper level, the story concerns resistance to the powers that be. Korolev, the unlikely hero, leads a rebellion almost by necessity, more as a “moral authority” than a virile force of conquest. However, the team of dissenters that Korolev leads lose their lives in the end, along with the powers that be, sending a message that political struggles of any kind are moot. Though it is an American team that rescues Korolev in the end, the team is interested in forging their own countercultural, frontier station not beholden to a political power.
Related Titles
By William Gibson
