The Precious Mettle of Night Sky Mine

(Review by Rupert Neethling, Cape Town, South Africa)

Melissa Scott is far from new to SF literature, and her previous book, Shadow Man, already proved that she is certainly equal to today’s best writers. Night Sky Mine is the book in which she blasts a lot of them out of their cyberniches.

In Night Sky Mine, the human species is spread out across several systems - roughly divided into the Centrality, the Federation (which answers to the Centrality) and the Territories (which do not). The reason for the division stems from a revolution in cyberspace, which came about because increasingly more complex software started taking on faunal- and floral characteristics, multiplying and devouring one another to a point far beyond their programmers’ control.

Hence the phenomenon known as the Crash, which led to regions where human control over software was deemed essential (the affluent Centrality) and, well, the rest, where wildware was regarded as a necessary, albeit dangerous and sometimes profitable evil. (Always on the lookout for the Demogorgon, of course, which was theorised to be the ultimate outcome of all the natural selection going on in the wilderness of cyberspace: an AI that would assimilate, Borg-like, all soft- and hardware within its reach.)

The vibrant people of the Federation comprise most of the characters in this book. From the gypsy grey-market Travellers to software-sanitising Patrol officers, and chip-plugging Union workers to hardware-hugging Agglomeration capitalists, they make their living from policing the regions between tame software and wild software, or poaching from the wild regions so as to sell useful hybrids on the grey market. All of this hacking happens in something known as “the invisible world” - a term which, by bridging into Fantasy, perfectly underscores Scott's evocative visions of cyberspace.

The narrative focuses on Ista, the only survivor of a mysterious attack on a mining station, and her search for the truth behind the catastrophe that had left her an orphan on Night Sky Mine. Her growth during this search, and the unexpected betrayals and equally surprising mercies from the people she meets during this journey, add a crucial human dimension to the novel.

By the end of Night Sky Mine, there will little doubt in the reader's mind that here stands a writer with her own voice, her own message, her own excellence.

Publisher: Tor Books, 1996

Explorations will be updated regularly.