Trouble and Her Friends

WORKING

Scott, Melissa. Trouble and Her Friends. New York, NY: Tor, 1994. For reprints, honors, and reviews, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database at following link.[1]

Important book for a variation on the cyberpunk theme of «meat» in the "realworld" of matter vs. «spirit/separable soul»/ (our terms) in cyberspace, where, in Trouble, embodiment and social contexts in the realworld still have their effects. Cf. and contrast e.g., W. Gibson's Neuromancer and his Sprawl series more generally, and the older, slow-motion debate over the question William Schuyler formulated as, "When Am I Still Me?" — after prosthetics, implants and other augmentations/changes, e.g., in such stories as "No Woman Born" and "Masks," which see. In Trouble one may figuratively fly through the VR of cyberspace, but the wired-in body still counts — and on the "nets," in cyberspace, some walk and the two central characters can end up crawling.

Scott can use "machines" for cybernetic devices — still with electromechanical drives in this 1994 novel — and this yields suggestive lines such as the following, many involving (minor Spoiler) the villain of the novel, "the Mayor" of Seahaven. (Format/Grammar note: scenes set on the "nets" [cyberspace, the metaverse] appear in italics in the 1994 Tor edition, and are narrated in present tense.)

RDE, finishing, 14Jan22 f.