Just Finished Reading: Arachne by Lisa Mason (FP: 1990) [263pp]

Her creation had cost a small fortune. Her body was sculptured in the latest style, her cybernetic implants were top shelf and her training at the best schools decades long. She was ready, ready to take her place in the world, ready to start earning the big bucks and ready to pay back her enormous debts. When Carly Nolan got her placement at one of the most prestigious law firms in post-quake San Francisco she knew that she had it made. But then, like a buddle bursting, everything went wrong. Just as she started her opening remarks on her very first case the nightmare happened – her link into ‘telespace’ failed and refused to re-connect. When she finally reappeared multiple seconds later the AI judge was less than impressed with her excuses. For wasting its valuable time the judge decreed that Carly needed to undergo an immediate therapy probe to determine the issue behind her problems and suspended her law licence until it was all sorted out. From potential golden girl to office pariah on her first day – how the mightily in debt have fallen. Seeing no option to comply Carly makes her appointment with an AI known as Prober Spinner to find out what happened to her Link. But the AI Prober has other ideas of what it can achieve with Carly under its probe. Spinner is part of an underground illegal AI racket bidding for parts of human souls they leave in ‘telespace’ every time they use the Link. Carly Nolan might be Prober Spinners ticket to the big time if only it can find a way of extracting her soul without being discovered.

This was, as you can imagine, a bit of an odd one. Clearly Cyberpunk in nature (or at least background) it was advertised as ‘LA Law scripted by William Gibson’. Sadly it wasn’t quite that good but it certainly had a few moments. The environment of a shattered and, as yet, unrecovered San Francisco was well handled complete with weird gangs, lots of homeless people and the great mass of urban poor/precariat. The legal firm is suitably cut-throat and is full of highly unlikable go-getters on various mood enhancing and skills enhancing pharmaceuticals which are suitably and nastily addictive. So the Cyberpunk vibe is definitely there. Most of the characters are pretty disposable (and often disposed of!) and, apart from Ms Nolan herself, there are few that you end up actually caring about. Prober Spinner is an interesting character as an AI on tracks – I saw ‘him’ as an almost analogue of ‘Number 5’ from Short Circuit – but even it/him along with Carly Nolan didn’t really have enough heft to carry the whole novel. I think the thing I liked most about Cyberpunk in general was missing here. Cyberpunk is, in my mind, the essence of high-tech low-life. Here we had some fairly high-tech but the low life aspects were very much in the background where they stayed. Although the main character was using her (largely artificial) skillset to escape from the lower strata of that world we don’t see very much of it from her point of view. I think it would have been more interesting if somehow she’d ended up back at the shallow end but with her enhanced skills now put to more nefarious ‘street’ uses. Saying all that this was, generally, a pretty reasonable read and I certainly enjoyed it enough to finish it. But saying THAT I won’t be spending any time looking out for the sequel. Reasonable.