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shemayazi enjoys trashy, tacky romances as much as I do, and she recently gave me a tall stack of anthologies, each with four novellas on a theme: four Victoriana stories, or four Regencies, or Twins, Changelings, and finally Alien Encounters.
I flipped through the first two stories with a blah sort of reaction, then stumbled with some delight into the novella Some Assembly Required (by "Dominique Tomas", although the copyright is assigned to "Michelle Levigne." Hmmm.) It opens with something halfway between a good premise and a good promise.
The heroine, Rahzel (not a bad name, a skiffy mangling of Rachel but okay) is a rare and troublemaking specialist: she is one of the few "mind divers" in a civilization that lives underground after some unspecified ecological disaster. Mind divers provide the cybernetic systems that keep them all alive with consciousness and reactivity, something which the machines cannot provide themselves. The biggest fear Bunker people have is that there will be a breach and the toxins of the outside world will get inside.
Rahzel is unusual in that Mind Divers go through several stages of evolution: after training and implanation of their cyberwear, they go their apartment where they will live the rest of their lives without any physical contact with another human being. Their lives are dedicated to sleep, self-maintainence, and keeping their civilization running. Eventually, a mind-diver transitions to existence as a brain in a vat. Rahzel has steadfastly refused that last stage. She likes living. She cooks for herself rather than suffer with the yeast cakes (a woman after my own heart!).
Rahzel's life becomes interesting when one of the many satellites that still watch over the Earth and the solar system sends down a communications block over a channel that hasn't been used for centuries. Circuits that haven't been activated for all that time come to life, and nobody inside the Bunker knows what's happening. All of the mind-divers who try to get inside that part of the network and understand what's happening report disturbing hallucinations.
Only Rahzel is able to continue to interact with the network segment that the data has awakened and now occupies. The hallucinations are more vivid for her than anyone else, but she can handle them because she's still in the habit of having a body and the hallucinations are all about touch and sensation, things no woman (there are no men, we learn late in the story) in the dome has experienced since childhood and all have been rigorously trained to avoid to prevent infection and contamination and so on.
Up until this point, the writer had me convinced that she knew what she was doing. That she had done her homework, that she understood a little about cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, and singularity fiction. I mean, so far, the author's done the same thing I did with my Visitor and Hiver story arcs, but she's doing it differently, she's a different writer. I think I handled my origins better, but so far she's doing rather well.
But then it all fell apart in a bad, silly, run-on love scene in which the inexplicably apostrophed hero La'rus magically appears in her little cubicle, teaches her the meaning of real, physical love, magically whisks away her cyberwear but, oh yeah, she can still "command the resources of the Bunker and the world with a mere thought!", and tells her that despite her constant access to the Bunker and its network of satellites that everything she's ever seen of the outside world is a lie, it's actually kinda nice, men and women survive out there in peace and love and harmony, using primitive tools and wind power and maybe steam if they need to cross an ocean, and they can run off and live happily ever after.
No explanation. No origin. No solid grasp on the science. Nothing. A movie-informed excuse to show people boinking. She watched Ghost in the Shell and thought, "I can write something like that."
Oh, bleah. I'm so disappointed.
shemayazi enjoys trashy, tacky romances as much as I do, and she recently gave me a tall stack of anthologies, each with four novellas on a theme: four Victoriana stories, or four Regencies, or Twins, Changelings, and finally Alien Encounters.I flipped through the first two stories with a blah sort of reaction, then stumbled with some delight into the novella Some Assembly Required (by "Dominique Tomas", although the copyright is assigned to "Michelle Levigne." Hmmm.) It opens with something halfway between a good premise and a good promise.
The heroine, Rahzel (not a bad name, a skiffy mangling of Rachel but okay) is a rare and troublemaking specialist: she is one of the few "mind divers" in a civilization that lives underground after some unspecified ecological disaster. Mind divers provide the cybernetic systems that keep them all alive with consciousness and reactivity, something which the machines cannot provide themselves. The biggest fear Bunker people have is that there will be a breach and the toxins of the outside world will get inside.
Rahzel is unusual in that Mind Divers go through several stages of evolution: after training and implanation of their cyberwear, they go their apartment where they will live the rest of their lives without any physical contact with another human being. Their lives are dedicated to sleep, self-maintainence, and keeping their civilization running. Eventually, a mind-diver transitions to existence as a brain in a vat. Rahzel has steadfastly refused that last stage. She likes living. She cooks for herself rather than suffer with the yeast cakes (a woman after my own heart!).
Rahzel's life becomes interesting when one of the many satellites that still watch over the Earth and the solar system sends down a communications block over a channel that hasn't been used for centuries. Circuits that haven't been activated for all that time come to life, and nobody inside the Bunker knows what's happening. All of the mind-divers who try to get inside that part of the network and understand what's happening report disturbing hallucinations.
Only Rahzel is able to continue to interact with the network segment that the data has awakened and now occupies. The hallucinations are more vivid for her than anyone else, but she can handle them because she's still in the habit of having a body and the hallucinations are all about touch and sensation, things no woman (there are no men, we learn late in the story) in the dome has experienced since childhood and all have been rigorously trained to avoid to prevent infection and contamination and so on.
Up until this point, the writer had me convinced that she knew what she was doing. That she had done her homework, that she understood a little about cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, and singularity fiction. I mean, so far, the author's done the same thing I did with my Visitor and Hiver story arcs, but she's doing it differently, she's a different writer. I think I handled my origins better, but so far she's doing rather well.
But then it all fell apart in a bad, silly, run-on love scene in which the inexplicably apostrophed hero La'rus magically appears in her little cubicle, teaches her the meaning of real, physical love, magically whisks away her cyberwear but, oh yeah, she can still "command the resources of the Bunker and the world with a mere thought!", and tells her that despite her constant access to the Bunker and its network of satellites that everything she's ever seen of the outside world is a lie, it's actually kinda nice, men and women survive out there in peace and love and harmony, using primitive tools and wind power and maybe steam if they need to cross an ocean, and they can run off and live happily ever after.
No explanation. No origin. No solid grasp on the science. Nothing. A movie-informed excuse to show people boinking. She watched Ghost in the Shell and thought, "I can write something like that."
Oh, bleah. I'm so disappointed.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-05 03:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-05 05:17 pm (UTC)Helpful tip for the writer: when you do your name-mangling, it helps to pick a name that doesn't have a fairly substantial cultural presence, particularly as a single name...
no subject
Date: 2007-09-05 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-05 08:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-05 08:25 pm (UTC)