Night Sky Mine (Hardcover)

In the far-future universe of the book, programs are no longer written, they're bred. They've been equipped with replication, attack, and defense code, and they live in the invisible world, preying on and interbreeding with other programs to form new ones. In the wildnets, programs interbreed at will, and are subject to evolutionary pressure - the wildnets are essentially a virtual ecosystem. Unfortunately, this opens up both the possibilities for useless or undesirable programs and the outside chance that a superprogram will evolve.

Ista, the main character, is an apprentice hypothecary, one who harvests wild program and analyzes code. She's lived for almost all her life in the coporation-owned Audumla system. She knows nothing of her antecedents; at age two, Ista was the sole survivor of a mineship attack, and was adopted by her rescuer. Without knowledge of her parents, she is not a legal citizen, so when she meets two men who are investigating mineship disasters, she has to help them. Together, they expose an illegal wild breeding effort and put themselves in danger.

The characters are likeable and fairly realistic. Ista is a streetwise adolescent, but definitely still not fully adult, and by far the most full-fleshed of the characters. The relationships between the characters are, at least in the first half, both believeable and understandable. (For example, Sein and Justin, the two men, fight the way long term couples fight.) In the second half, the characters are subsumed by the plot, which is unfortunate.

Good Scott novels leave you wanting to know more about the world, the setting, and this one is no exception. Although the plot is interesting enough to hold attention, it's really just a framework for exploring the universe. The book would have been better had the plot been more complex - and the book quite a bit longer - but it's a great SF read nonetheless.

I was often annoyed by the very poor editing of this book. It's rife with grammar and spelling mistakes which essentially act like reading speed bumps. The author also has a habit of inserting lengthy statements into the middle of sentences by hyphenating them - often at awkward places, and often several lines in length, in fact sometimes quite a bit longer than this one, making sentences rather hard to follow- when a separate sentence would be much cleaner. By the end of the book, I was pretty tired of having to reread the beginnings of sentences due to this.

Another bad habit which pops up throughout the book is the unexplained use of made-up words. Apparently the author feels that to stop and explain every new term would bog things down, which is true, but instead of limiting her use of meaningless words, she just throws them around and lets the reader's imagination go at them. While this is fine to some extent, there is too much of it in this book. There are lists of names of cyberspace denizens which serve no purpose at all. On the other hand, I would have liked more description of some of the terms, like "hypothecary". The main character is studying to become one, and the reader learns a bit about it through her actions, but still many questions are left unanswered. The reader would have been better served by more description of the important terms and less use of the meaningless ones.

The cyberspace concept here is fairly original, although like almost every other cyberspace in SF, it's too far removed from the reality of electronic information to be believable to anyone with a technical background. The portrayal of software personified as flora and fauna is an interesting one in concept, but the execution goes wa! y too far in giving data the attributes of physical objects or creatures. Too many times I found myself wondering why things would have developed the way they had in the book.

Like most of the author's protagonists, the main characters are gay, although unlike some of her other work, that point is irrelevant to the story. This book isn't about gay characters, it's about characters who happen to be gay. Unfortunately, these gay heroes are all pretty one-dimensional. Except for Ista, the main protagonist, practically no background is given for any of the characters. Even Ista's origins are a mystery to both the characters and the reader. Likewise, the only growth or development any of the characters experience in the book is the occasional reference to Ista's budding romantic feelings towards her friend Stinne. Even this doesn't go anywhere- the situation between them is basically the same at the end of the book as at the beginning.

All in all, this book was a decent effort, but no single aspect of it really held my attention for very long. Even the ending was something of a letdown- it felt like the author wasn't sure how she should end it and ended up leaving too much unresolved. It screams "sequel". Unfortunately there are too many books on the shelf better than this one for me to continue with this story.