Gibson injected new life into a sciencefiction genre that seemed tired to many in the 1980s. As Bruce Sterling accurately noted in the introduction to the Ace Books edition, the apocalypse so essential to classic 1950s-generated cold-war sci-fi is a nonconcern for Gibson: "The triumph of these pieces was their brilliant, self-consistent evocation of a credible future." In a marked departure from cold-war post-apocalyptic science fiction, life goes on in Gibson's collection.

Readers of Gibson's stories sometimes complain that the components of the worlds he creates are never explained. For example, "The Winter Market" never mentions the word simstim but does employ the same feel to the experience. The kids Casey gets to test Kings of Sleep he has "smeared saline paste on their temples, taped the trodes on" is similar enough to the description in "Burning Chrome" of Rikki wearing the "contact band across her forehead like...