Arachne

With its blend of lawyers practicing in cyberspace, a near-dystopian future wherein Aborigine and Aztec cultists roam the streets and college campuses are martial-law city-states policed by armed revolutionaries, Jungian archetypes made manifest in the consensus-reality of the telelink, and put-upon AIs wishing humanity would do a better job of recognizing their sentience, Arachne by Lisa Mason is a brilliant cyberpunk novel. The book's two main protagonists, hot-shot human lawyer Carly Nolan and an AI called Prober Spinner, are very well-written and engaging; Pr. Spinner is particularly fascinating in her love-hate relationship with humanity. Arachne is another cyberpunk book that explores what it means to be human, what are the boundaries of being human, and can these boundaries be transcended or, at the very least, gone beyond. In addition to this fascinating aspect of the book, Mason builds a lived-in, believable, near-future California that is tinged with dark humor (such as when traffic gridlocks last so long fixed communities start to spring up). The book stumbles, in my estimation, in Carly's dalliance with a co-worker. In these passages, Mason's usual taut, brisk, evocative prose (which, with its futuristic neologisms, reminded me somewhat of A Clockwork Orange) descends a bit into treacly romance-novel language (particularly bothersome was a reference to Carly's "delta"). But the book recovers from these sections, as indeed does Carly, and the final third is thrilling as Carly and Pr. Spinner strive to overcome a threat inside cyberspace that could have dire consequences for Carly in the 'real' world. Overall, Arachne was a fun and fast book, an excellent exemplar of the cyberpunk genre.