Sometimes you can read a work and you can appreciate it for the language and the innovation and the originality, and still not enjoy it.

I did not enjoy this. I can tell it's quality work, but it's just not to my taste. I had to pace myself and read one story from this collection a day because I wasn't interested enough to read two at a time and I wanted to get through it. So why have I given it three stars, which correlates to a general liking? Well, there were two stories in here that I did like, and I don't think it's a coincidence that those two had a co-writer: "Red Star, Winter Orbit" written with Bruce Sterling, and "Dogfight" with Michael Swanwick. These two dragged the collection up from two stars - admittedly two stars is ill-deserved from a quality perspective, but again: I didn't much enjoy reading this.

For all Gibson's stories are linguistically and visually interesting, I get no emotional effect from him whatsoever. I can only assume that Sterling and Swanwick were the difference in those two stories, because I actually felt something when I read them, and it was not an objectively impressed indifference.