Burning Bright

Scott, Melissa. Burning Bright. New York City: Tor, 1993. For reprints, reviews, and awards, see the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, at link here.[1]

As of the end of January 2022, the Publisher's Weekly summary and evaluation can be found at this link.[2]

Once we get planetside and beyond avoided issues like faster-than-light travel and the evolution of "human space" and that of humanoid aliens, Burning Bright includes the usual sort of near-future technology, presented quietly and elegantly; of some interest for the theme of this wiki: very large Carnival puppets on floating floats — we're in a city like Venice — that are explicitly called "automata" and capable of movement and transformation beyond what we could hope to see at Mardi Gras. Of greater interest for users of this wiki would be "net walking" both like and unlike that in Scott's Trouble and Her Friends (1994) and William Gibsonian cyberpunk cyberspace. In Burning Bright, one walks the Nets, rather than sensations of flying or floating; there are implants and cybernetic gloves — and references to complex hard-wired connections to cybernetic systems — but for the most part users of those cybernetic systems are outside the Net perceiving in, using interfaces not far beyond ours, not near-total immersion into/in a total VR world. Significantly, the planet Burning Bright is a center for "the Game": a computer-mediated, multiplayer role-playing game (RPG) with each session on a small scale of under a dozen players. When in the Game, players are in the game. Such a sequence, however, is narrated as an "Interlude" and set off from the primary world of Burning Bright: total immersion in the virtual reality of the Game, without reference to the Game hardware, rather like the Sagas glimpsed at the opening of A. C. Clarke's 1957 work, The City and the Stars.

RDE, finishing, 29Jan22