1993 sf. Quinn Lioe is a pilot and a Gamer, and a layover on the world
of Burning Bright puts her in the heart of the Game.
Scott's themes and favourite subjects recur: small merchant
ships, innocent actions having great political consequences,
virtual-reality role-playing games, and baroque multi-model public
transport systems. (I'm not complaining.) They're recurrent themes,
but not a recurrent setting, in part because in each book Scott is
willing to overset the existing order, or at least put it at risk.
Lioe has a new scenario, and she's mostly just interested in running
it at one of the clubs; but she knows people, and she makes contact
with other people, and soon enough someone with something to hide is
considering having her removed from circulation simply because she
might be interfering with his plans.
Burning Bright is a world poised between two larger polities, serving
as an entrepot. (I did find myself wondering what was the point of
landing all the cargo to warehouse it on-world, rather than keeping it
in orbit and transferring it directly to another ship, but hey.) One
of those polities is the HsaioiAn, unfortunately Japanese-coded
(there's a lot of talk about status and "face", and an Emperor with
whom nobody may express disagreement), and one of their factions has
sent someone to cause trouble out of their embassy… all of this will
get tangled up together, and indeed one could sum up this thread as
"plots defeated by plotters' paranoia".
But what's also going on is a consideration of the Game, and of how
the various scenarios in it never manage to make any progress: the
struggle between Imperium and Rebellion is always balanced, and even
the greatest of runs of a scenario won't change anything for anyone
else. (And I look at the publication date; this is a year or two after
role-playing publishers had begun making experiments with an ongoing
metaplot rather than a static game setting, for example in Torg
(1990) and the Dark Sun setting (1991).)
It's all rather fine. I particularly like the characters and the
shades of their relationships; while you might be able to group them
into team Good and team Bad, these are not monolithic, and there's
plenty of friction within those blocs and cooperation across the
lines. Most of the people here are grown-ups, rather than fanatics who
will throw good resources after bad once their plans have clearly
miscarried.