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Winner of the 1995 Lambda Literary Award for Gay/Lesbian Science Fiction

Trouble And Her Friends was also
short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr., Award

A Novel of the Virtual Frontier...

In the not very distant future, the United States has cracked down on the world of the computer nets, forcing illegal netwalkers like India Carless, aka Trouble, to reform or adapt to a new series of laws. India, once a powerful force in the shadow world of the nets, got out just ahead of the laws, abandoning her friends and her lover, and now runs the computer system for an artists' co-op.

But now someone has appropriated her name and is using it for a kind of illegal hacking she has always despised, and the forces of the law - including her ex-lover, now head of security for a major bright-lights corporation - are looking for her. To clear her name, Trouble has to return to the nets, looking for one last showdown.

Reviews

Analog
"Both excellent and thought-provoking"
Booklist
"Scott... delivers yet another fresh perspective on [cyberspace]. Scott's dazzling rendition of virtual reality... is vivid and creditably prophetic. her best work to date."
Philadelphia Inquirer
"Provocative, well written, and thoroughly entertaining, Trouble And Her Friends marks a new high in Melissa Scott's impressive career."

(So far, this is my favorite cover, though the art for Night Sky Mine runs it a close second. Both are by Nick Jainschigg, as are the covers for Burning Bright and Shadow Man.)

Where did this one come from? Well, some of the sources are obvious and ubiquitous in SF: the entire cyberpunk movement, plus books like Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown, Katie Hafner and John Markoff's Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, and (of course) Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg.

But more influential was the constant use of "the frontier" as a metaphor for the internet, virtual reality, and its imagined successors. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation -an excellent and worthwhile organization in its own right - nonetheless is quite deliberately evoking those images in ways that don't always match reality.) Here in the US, that idea carries an enormous freight, a complex blend of history, myth, and reality that is only rarely examined in any depth. I was strongly influenced by Western film and novels, particularly Shane, by structuralist studies of the Western, and most of all by Jane Tompkins' fascinating West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, which discusses the Western novel as a reaction to and protest against the popular women's novels of the 19th century. If the Net really is the Virtual Frontier, then I wanted to see how the familiar tropes of the Western - the outlaw, the returning gunslinger - played out in the new setting, and viewed through a queer and feminist lens.

The strangest thing about this book has been the way that the crackdowns in the novel have preceded attempts at crackdown in the real world. The primary difference is that the realworld attempts have centered around sex - pornography and potential child abuse - rather than crime, theft and violence. I probably should have guessed that would be the way it would happen, and I tried to make up for it in The Jazz.

And, of course, the perfect song was the Moody Blues' "Legend of a Mind" - especially since Timothy Leary had reemerged as a champion of virtual reality.

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