1992 sf. Reverdy Jian is hired to test-fly an old, but still advanced,
starship. But everyone has a different desired outcome, and a plan for
achieving it.
I found this very reminiscent of Mighty Good Road in the
outline of the plot (a team of specialists is hired for a mission,
does the job, then deals with the consequences), with elements of The
Kindly Ones (huge political complications deliberately invoked). Here
the trick is that FTL ships need an "overseer", a computer
sophisticated enough to translate hyperspace into a virtual world for
the pilot to react to, and so far nobody's built one that's actually
sapient… except, perhaps, the eccentric genius who built this ship.
There's a pressure group, Dreampeace, which argues that the existing
constructs are already sapient; but this industrial world runs largely
on indentured labour, and they aren't going to be happy if the
machines get more rights than they do. On the other side, the big
shipbuilding companies that run the planet would love to have an
advanced construct that they can prune back a bit and sell as the
next generation…
That's combined with a lot of practical detail; I think of the
writers I've read Scott is the one who focuses most on the practical
business of getting from place to place across multiple interlinked
modes of public transport, and she always manages to make it
fascinating. Similarly there's a walled-garden model of overlapping
data services (perhaps inspired by Compuserve, AOL, etc.) rather than
one that does everything. (Mind you, the thing that really dates it
for me is that storage space is precious and limited—it's an artefact
of the floppy disc era much more than of anything that would come
later.)
There's also the flight itself, slightly reminiscent of Five-Twelfths
of Heaven, which leaves me feeling a little that this is a
greatest-hits for Scott: most of these elements have been used before,
in books that gave them primacy individually. But they never feel like
a retread; rather, these are things she considers important and
interesting enough to revisit from a slightly different angle. Perhaps
the ending is a bit of a let-down, in part because of its suddenness,
in part because of a final revelation that falls a little flat, but I
enjoyed it greatly up to that point.
Like Mighty Good Road, this is cyberpunk in genre while having
something to offer beyond just more hackers and street fighters in the
infinite decaying city.