In her second novel, Someone to Watch Over Me (1997), Tricia Sullivan reconciles cyberpunk with traditional romantic narrative. She does this by converting a triangle into a straight line. This collapse of the geometry of plot and character is executed with cool verve, with remarkable technical control, making Someone one of the most stylish SF novels of recent years.

How should a love triangle be resolved? Sullivan, eschewing orthodox formulae such as death or bigamy, contrives a technological answer, but one with rich emotional resonance. In her early Twenty-First Century, as in any cyberpunk future, human/computer interface has become readily possible; but, less conventionally, this has become no end in itself, but rather a means for people to interface mentally with each other. Sullivan has moved beyond the Gibsonian preoccupation with the conflict of corporations and hackers over inanimate data; she assumes that the information we desire is the detail and texture of other human minds. Her technological underground is the Deep: a widespread community of initiates who pool their experience and talents in an electronic telepathy that is yielding promising but also menacing synergies. One member of the Deep, ‘C’, lives in crippling sensory deprivation; she is able to inhabit the physical world only vicariously, looking out through the eyes of proxies who carry implants to which she is attuned. But she has obtained a breakthrough device called ‘I’, for Immortality: it will allow her consciousness to be transferred wholly and permanently into another’s body. Her faithful proxy or ‘trans’, Adrien Reyes, seems an ideal vehicle; ‘C’’s love for him is consumingly selfish and possessive, to the extent that she would become him. But, sensing her encroachment, and developing a competing love for another woman (Sabina, a rootless Croatian composer), he breaks off all contact with ‘C’. A craftily constructed pursuit ensues.

Against a zanily rendered background of criminal intrigue and cultural decadence, in New York, Moscow, and elsewhere, ‘I’ merges ‘C’ not with Adrien but with Sabina; if ‘C’ cannot possess Adrien in the supernatural sense of inhabiting him, she can yet possess him emotionally, by usurping the body of his lover. Sullivan’s greatest achievement in Someone lies in her careful delineation of the attempted conquest of Sabina by ‘C’; surreal mental territories are intriguingly explored, in illuminating contrast with the psychological landscapes of other characters, notably ‘C’’s other ‘trans’, Tomaj Robinson. Tomaj disintegrates as his multitudinous sub-personalities (cultural and experiential fragments) riot within him; but Sabina achieves reconciliation with ‘C’, a process by which Sabina, originally a third-person narrative subject, acquires ‘C’’s first-person narrative voice, and ‘C’, from being only a parasitical vicarious Watcher, becomes able physically to act again as well as ‘see’. Thus Sullivan resolves the love triangle: the harmony of Sabina and ‘C’ (which translates into new musical inspiration for Sabina) ends their conflict for Adrien’s affection, and they can as one woman contemplate a more orthodox romantic harmony with Adrien. Cyberpunk’s postmodern collaging of identities facilitates a traditional love story; Adrien and Sabina comprehend each other fully in the novel’s complex ending. And so Sullivan redeems cyberpunk with humanity and the love story with novelty; and perhaps such marriages of old and new will temper the storms of the Twenty-First Century, the blizzards of future shock.

ORION MILLENNIUM (UK). 1998. PAPERBACK.