6 September, 2001
Trouble and Her Friends
Melissa Scott
1995
379 pp (PB)
This review was posted on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written. You can read the discussion here.
I picked up this book because I thought the title sounded cool, and upon reading the blurb, I discovered that I was in the mood for a little cyberpunk. The basic idea sounds like a bit of mindless cyberpunky fun: A retired hacker is drawn back into the world she once dominated when somebody starts using her nom de guerre, "Trouble," to perpetrate flashy, disruptive attacks on systems around the world. Not only does this put the authorities on her case, it threatens her reputation among hackers, because the attacks are so badly done. She sets out to discover who's taking her name in vain, and stop them. In the process of doing so, she meets up with her ex-girlfriend (also an ex-hacker, now a respectable system security guru for a multinational corporation), and faces the prospect of rekindling their romance.
So far, so good. While reading the book, I felt like I was enjoying it, for the most part. However, upon further reflection, I feel that the book is deeply flawed in several ways. The "solution" of the mystery of who's messing with Trouble is very unsatisfying, and comes close to making absolutely no sense whatsoever. Either the author or the main character (I can't tell who) has a huge chip on her shoulder which is very intrusive into the flow of the story, and contributes to the problem with the ending.
More discussion of good and bad points after the:
SPOILER WARNING
So, I'm reading along, enjoying the flow of the story, wondering about who the culprit could be, when all of a sudden, I'm hit with Trouble or Cerise (the main characters) thinking something along the lines of "Well, of course everybody hates me/us because I'm a woman, and homosexual." This happens way too many times in the novel. I can't tell if the hang-up is the characters' or the author's, but it is really annoying. Especially since for almost all the book, there is no indication, apart from the character's opinion, that anybody even mildly dislikes her because she's a lesbian.
That would seem to indicate that the problem is the character's, rather than the author's, apart from one thing-- in the end, when we find out why the bad guy was out to get Trouble, the reason is, that he's a psycho homophobic misogynist. That's it. He has no other motivation. The whole plot is ruined by the fact that the antagonist went through so much effort, concocted such a complicated plan, to target this one individual simply because she's a lesbian. There's not even any reason given for why he decided to target THAT lesbian, of all the lesbians in the world. This would have been a much better book if the villain had had a more interesting motivation.
Not to mention the logical inconsistancies in the setup. So, supposedly there's a lot of prejudice among the majority straight male hackers against gay and female hackers. And, also, the culture of those straight male hackers strongly discourages "real life" contact with each other. So, like, how do they know if anybody is a woman or not? After all, on the Net, nobody knows that you're a dog, or a lesbian for that matter.
Plus, the book leaves several plot threads dangling. For example, why was Cerise's boss so personally interested in catching and "dealing with" the person who cracked their company's system? And why are shadey people on the Net interested in his personnel folder? We never find out.
This is not to say that the book has no redeeming features. The relationship between Trouble and Cerise is very well-done, indeed. This would have been a much better book if Scott had played down the lame mystery plot and played up the romance plot. (As it is, the book is about half and half, or maybe a little bit more on the mystery side.)
This book did bring to mind something Neal Stephenson said in an interview after Cryptonomicon came out. He said something like he was trying an experiment to see if a sysadmin could make a compelling fictional character. Personally, I didn't find Randy that compelling. I don't buy Stephenson's novels to read about ordinary people like sysadmins. I buy them to read about crazy, adventurous folk like Bobby Shaftoe, or Hiro Protagonist. Anyway, Cerise is a sysadmin who is also a compelling character. She's the best part of this book. So I guess the lesson is, if you're going to try to make an interesting sysadmin character, make it a stylish lesbian ex-hacker sysadmin, rather than a fictional version of the guy with the shaggy beard who works in the machine room down the hall.
I really liked the way Scott describes accessing the Net via that old cyberpunk trope, the direct-to-brain link. She conveys the dreamlike nature of the experience perfectly. It was almost worth dealing with the lousy plot, to read those bits.