Cyberweb - Hardcover

Mason, Lisa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688139876 ISBN 13: 9780688139872

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1995

Synopsis

From the author of Arachne, the story of Carly Nolan, an outcast fleeing indictment, and her decrepit companion finds them cruising the underpinnings of the electronic superhighway, confronting robot hit-persons, urban savages, and malevolent, independent supercomputers.

About this title

Reviews

Set in the same universe as Mason's previous Arachne, this chronicle of San Francisco attorney Carly Nolan-who loses her position because of an anomaly in her "telespace" link, known as an "arachne" for its spiderlike appearance-and her robotic companions Saint Download and Pr. Spinner fails on several levels. One of these is its prose: "Two women, astonishing and beautiful, the way the water of the Bay was beautiful when poison slicked its surface in green and blue swirls and astonished him with sudden sickness at its taste." More perilously, Mason seems awed by the gadgetry she presents, more so than readers are likely to be. Finally, she posits a romanticized band of "aborigines," led by Ouija, who seem little more than Luddites. (Says Ouija, of his people's life: "We hunt, we feed, we fuck, we are free.") Mason allows her sympathies, not her characters, to move the story line, which culminates in a contrived tearjerker ending.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Mason's Arachne (1990) engagingly recounted the cyberspace struggles of genetically enhanced attorney Carly Nolan, whose career was shattered when a spiderlike phantom haunted her virtual reality "telespace" trial hearings. In Cyberweb, Carly returns, accompanied by her robot sidekicks, Saint Download and Professor Spinner, and determined to regain her reputation by taking control of the phantom's uncanny "hyperlink" telespace powers. While biding her time, subsisting on Dumpster rations and hiding out from the all-seeing eyes of Data Control, Carly is kidnapped into the service of Cognatus, a mainframe artificial intelligence, or AI, that offers big money for Carly's knack for hyperlinking her way into classified data stores. Under Professor Spinner's doting tutelage, Carly quickly comes to suspect that Cognatus' real and malevolent motive, which emanates from a collective of independent AI "silicon supremacists," is to undermine human control of telespace. Mason's prose often has more burlesque and less grit in it than that of many cyberspace vehicles, but her endearing characters and their absorbing adventures will hook even the most jaded sf fan. Carl Hays

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688139876
• ISBN 13: 9780688139872
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 262