Melissa Scott's "Trouble and Her Friends" is light reading-- I picked it up at a time when I knew I was going on a lot of plane trips. When I bought it, I didn't realize I had read anything by Scott before, but after 10 pages or so, I suddenly recognized the style and connected "Trouble" with "Shadow Man," a book by Scott I had read a few years earlier. I'll give "Trouble" a weak "0" and "Shadow Man" a weak "+."
Scott has great ideas for sci fi books, but simply doesn't execute them very well. She pays attention to social factors and generally creates complex characters with genuine motivations, but somehow, the words themselves fall flat. Her sentences can be a little awkward and her descriptions aren't very fresh. Sometimes the timing feels forced or goes too fast or too slow.
To insert a mini review-within-a-review, "Shadow Man" has a brilliant premise. Humans have travelled to a distant planet to colonize it, but they discover when they get there that the drugs they used to induce years of sleep (for the long space flight) have wrought fundamental changes in the human genome. There are now five genders and nine sexualities, which brings many societal consequences. Scott doesn't do a fabulous job of turning this premise into a fascinating tale, but I'll rate it a weak + for the interest factor. Even sci fi authors are seldom so bold.
In contrast, "Trouble and Her Friends" has a weaker premise, which, coupled with Scott's bland writing, makes for a book that I rate a weak 0. The plot is nothing stellar. The hacker community (analogous to today's open-source community and Gen-X programmers generally) has gotten used to having free reign on the Nets. Those who know how to get around have created a whole society online, some of it legal and some not. As is typical in cyberpunk books, the Net is a full-body experience where people represent themselves as avatars while their physical lie strapped to wires in a dark room somewhere. A new invention called the brain worm (which is illegal) can be implanted to transform the Net's properties into physical sensations, and all the main characters have the implant.
But then the government comes in and messes everything up, passing a law called Evans-Tindale that regulates online actions in a way that severely restricts the hacker community. It disrupts the close group of friends introduced in the first chapter, one of whom is Trouble, a young lesbian woman known for her brilliant code, sharp tongue, and sharper wit. Then comes the next insult-- a kid takes the online name "Trouble" and starts committing crimes and bragging about it. The government starts a major search for Trouble, but will it catch the right one? Can the original Trouble clear her name, even though Evans-Tindale makes most of her previous activities illegal anyway?
There are some twists and turns in the plot along the way. And the story is actually told from the point of view of Cerise, Trouble's old girlfriend (they separated in the hubbub when Evans-Tinsdale was passed). Cerise left the hacker community to work for a major corporation when Evans-Tindale came into effect, and the false Trouble hacks into her corporation. So she must help track down Trouble (whom she desperately hopes isn't really her old girlfriend), adding a complication to the investigation.
Anyway, it's pretty standard cyberpunk. Nothing really earthshattering. Scott often writes about the queer community, so it is no surprise that most of the characters in the book are queer or at least not stereotypically straight. Unlike in "Shadow Man," this seems to be irrelevant to the main plot-- just sort of tossed in for interest and a heightened sense of danger (homophobia hasn't exactly vanished by the late 21st century).
It's OK for the plane, but don't waste neural energy on it.
Copyright © Kim Allen 2000
