From Amazon.com
Misinformation, PR, disinformation, rumors, spinning, lies--in the near future, the art of untruth has evolved into the jazz: virtual-reality Internet theatre, an entertainment for the cognoscenti and a source of pain and scandal for those who believe what they see, read, or experience. Tin Lizzy has escaped her troubled criminal adolescence to become one of the premiere design programmers of the jazz. But when she agrees to design the back-tech for a teenage boy's brilliant jazz scenario, she discovers too late that Keyz created his jazz with a sophisticated program stolen from a Hollywood studio. Now Lizzy is a criminal again, a desperate fugitive on the run with Keyz through the dangerous underground of the 21st century, fleeing cops, bounty hunters, studio detectives, and a powerful, ruthless CEO who has a secret to preserve, and boundless resources and vindictiveness.
Quietly, outside the hot, critical spotlight turned upon the original cyberpunks and second-generation cyberwunderkind Neil Stephenson, Melissa Scott has become one of the strongest, most productive, and least street-glamour-blinded cyberpunks writing at the turn of the millennium. This is not entirely a surprise; in 1986, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She is also a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award for best science fiction novel. If you haven't read Melissa Scott, The Jazz is a fine place to start. --Cynthia Ward
From Publishers Weekly
Best known for her densely conceived, far-future settings, complex plotting and radical political commentary, Scott (Dreaming Metal; The Shapes of Their Hearts) here offers her fans a more straightforward, near-future cyberthriller. Tin Lizzy, another of the author's highly competent hackers with a heart of gold, makes her living producing virtual background scenarios for the jazz, the newest Internet art form: an inspired combination of personality journalism, gossip, cyberpranks and outright lies. When Lizzy finds herself teamed with Keyz, a teenaged boy whose jazz has jumped seemingly overnight from amateur to brilliant, she senses that something isn't right. Her fears are confirmed when, soon after his first professional sale, Keyz discloses that he's been helped by Orpha-Toto, a secret and highly experimental expert program that he's stolen from one of the major movie studios. Hounded by Gardner Gerretty, the ruthless CEO of the studio, the same man who was responsible for Lizzy's having done hard time many years earlier, the two hackers find themselves fleeing across an increasingly strange, near-future America, looking desperately for a way to escape from Gerretty's monomaniacal pursuit. Less ambitious than Scott's very best work and marred by a villain whose sheer relentlessness strains credulity, this is nonetheless a powerfully imagined suspense novel. Scott maintains her position, first established in Trouble and Her Friends, as one of the best writers around in portraying what life online may really be like in the future. (June) FYI: Scott has won two Lambda Awards for her SF.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
