mrissa | The Fortunate Fall, by Cameron Reed

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I was just recently at a picnic with the author, so that's nice.

Some of you may have read this book when its author was writing under her previous name. This is a Tor Essentials rerelease with a new introduction written by Jo Walton saying why she liked it so much the first time around.

One of the things that's astonishing to me about The Fortunate Fall is how clearly it thinks about the internet compared to a lot of cyberpunk preceding it. The political and social mores of having some people telling stories, others filtering those stories, and still others receiving without knowing what's gone into either part of the process--that's something that's so well-done in The Fortunate Fall, something that's less the mirrorshades cool of early cyberpunk and more the scarred and lumpy reality we actually got.

Maya Andreyeva's life as a "camera" is not a glamorous one. Like everyone else who has been wired to record, she's hustling to convey the most compelling sensations and impressions of whatever it is she's covering, in hopes that it be safe and yet daring enough to broadcast. She got the job she got at the beginning of the book--covering a forgotten genocide--by sheer trickery, and that's more or less status quo. Her new "screener" Keishi seems familiar and inexperienced at the same time, and Maya has constant difficulty trusting her.

That's before they get to the whale, or the technological pan-African empire, or the swapping of hardware to get around different kinds of repression...there's a lot going on in this book, and it's fascinating, and one of the things that's really fascinating is that the stuff that was then-unusual and is now-usual is still written well. I'm thinking in particular of the same-sex relationship that's the center of the book. Cameron wrote toward a world where no one would have to pat your hand and tell you not to be scared of the lesbians, and partly as a result of that we got to that world. And because it's not hand-patting about it, the core of the relationship holds up beautifully. It's a wonder to behold. And now you can behold it! Because it's available again.