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Dreaming Metal

Five years after the Manfred riots, the question of machine intelligence is still a dangerous one on Persephone, and the coolie rights organization Realpeace is not prepared to let it go. For conjurer Celinde Fortune and her musician cousin Fanning Jones, the conflict is a distant one - until the murder of a popular musician raises the stakes even for the most determinedly uninvolved. And when Fortune acquires a new Spelvin construct to manage her magic act - originally owned by an FTL pilot named Reverdy Jian - she is thrust suddenly into the middle of the problem. Because this construct is something different, and that difference can get them all killed.

Reviews

Locus

"For all the excitement generated by conspiracies and bomb threats and assassinations, this is not a milleu for action heroes and melodrama, but one in which ordinary people do their work, pursue their dreams, and have unhappy love affairs. That is what makes this book a science fiction novel and not just another adventure novel."

Analog

"Obviously, there's something here for the literary analysts to play with. But there's also plenty for the ordinary reader. Scott is definitely one of modern SF's true dreamers."

Booklist

"An intriguing examination of artificial intelligence (AI). Scott subtly links machine rights and the rights of any aggrieved minority, and there is poetry in her brilliant technical flights."

This is as close to a sequel to Dreamships as I'm ever likely to do. The reading list has remained pretty much the same as it was for Dreamships, with Antonio R. Damasio's Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Richard E. Cytowic's The Man Who Tasted Shapes, and Robert Walser's Running With the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music the books that I go back to most often. I've also stumbled across a number of articles that been useful, either in adding ideas or images - in particular, an article from Smithsonian Magazine called "You can almost hear the gears turn insdie his head", about MIT-based sculptor Arthur Ganson, and another from Electronic Musician's December issue's Tech Page, about a company called Interactive Light and its new light-based MIDI controller, the Dimension Beam. (Yes, it's a bit like a Theramin, but programmable.) The latter in particular made me rethink some of my technical assumptions, but it confirmed that what I had been thinking of was possible and something musicians could actually afford.

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