Let me begin with a bold statement: I will be on the lookout for the next book by Melissa Scott & Lisa Barnett. They certainly know how to spin an enjoyable tale. Point of Hopes brings the reader into a fantastical mystery, set in pseudo-Renaissance time. All the characters are thoroughly intriguing, some downright enthralling (though some of the names are a bit of a mouthful). The reader is drawn into their espacades and actually cares what happens to those involved. I have only two regrets for the book: first the pacing was marvelous up until the very end; I became worried when I realized I was 80% done the book and there was still too much of the unknown left in the mystery. What follows happens in such a quick pace that I think the reader will feel out of sorts by the suddeness of things revealed (and dealt with). My second gripe was that there were romantic leaning developing between the two main characters throughout the book but these never, ever, came to fruition. So I was left feeling a bit jaded. I can only hope that a sequel is written that can solve this last problem. Still, this novel shows excellent craftsmanship and should be included in any die-hard fantasy-lover's bookshelf.

One of the more irritating tendencies of fantasy literature is the constant depiction of extremes of class. In many novels, every major character is either a member of at least the lower ranks of nobility or else some kind of petty criminal. _Point of Hopes_ is refreshing in that most of its characters are somewhere in the middle; ordinary people with honest trades trying to get by. The main characters are a temporarily out of work mercenary (he's worked his way up from the ranks to a minor officer's position, but it's difficult to find an employer who's willing to hire a commoner for a commissioned rank) and a constable (the local title is Pointsman), and the most of their associates are tavern keepers, shop owners, and the odd underpaid scholar. Add to this an environment based roughly on sixteenth century France (with a few changes such as a pagan state religion, women's equality with men, and unquestioned toleration of homosexuality), a renegade alchemist plotting against the reigning monarch, and a mysterious series of kidnappings, and one has a novel worth reading and re-reading. I hope Scott and Barnett are planning a sequel, and in any event I look forward to their next work.

I found the sexual/ social issues in this book very interesting. Nowadays there is very little SF I can handle- it all seems to be cookie-cutter adventure series. Shadow Man sets itself apart by looking at something I haven't seen before, namely the social issues facing humans who have been split into five sexes rather than two. My interest was also held by the society described in the book, which is an unusual mix of technology and a more primitive lifestyle.

I admit that the plot wasn't the most exciting- it was basically a vehicle for the book's social issues. However, I found the issues discussed in the book more than enough to keep me reading to the end.

I have since read two more by the same author, Trouble And Her Friends and Night Sky Mine, which are more traditional cyberpunk adventures. While they're OK (and are unusual in that their heroines and heroes are mostly gay), they don't center around the same kind of ideas that made me think while reading Shadow Man. It's definitely the most interesting of the three.

An intelligent social scifi-fantasy book, which does not forget action as well. The topic of gender is more earth-life adapted than U.Guin's book and the observations of transgender and intersex and gay problematics highly accurate.

Best book I read last year. Absolutely recomended and I hope they reprint it!

The ideas explored in this book, centering around gender identity and sexuality, never prevent the characters from being real people. Not for the fans of whiz-bang space opera, but a solidly written page turner, full of social and political intrigue. Once again, Melissa Scott has given us an imaginative yet believable universe with sympathetic multi-dimensional characters. You go girl!

This is the first book of a trilogy. The other two are _Silence_In_Solitude_ and _Empress_of_Earth_. The main characters are scilence and her two husbands Julian (Julie) Chase Mago and Dennis Balthasar. The technological innovation of this story is that interstellar travel happens by means of music. I enjoyed this trilogy because I identify strongly with Melissa Scott's writing style, but the trilogy has major flaws in its characterization- for example between books one and two the threesome goes from having no physical relationship to having a perfectly comfortable, taken-for-granted one.

Melissa Scott has played with a lot of conventional genres and SF story elements, but her best work pushes some of the boundaries. In Five-Twelfths of Heaven, she creates an unusual - and successful - cross between fantasy and science fiction, as well as continuing her tradition of dealing with gender roles and society.

The universe of Five-Twelfths is a fairly standard one in some ways. The Hegemon, a widening empire of many planets, is a tightly-controlled, autocratic society that places extreme limits on women; women must be veiled at all times, aren't allowed to own property or take legal actions, etc. However, the fantasy element comes in with the elements of star travel, which are much like magic, and especially the magi, who are able to use spells to control both Purgatory (the celestial, partially supermaterial state attainable by material creatures) and Hell (the submaterial state). The blending of the typical SF and unusual fantasy elements make this world a unique and complete creation, interesting in its own right.

The plot is also fairly good. Five-Twelfths is the story of Silence, a woman in the very male-restricted profession of pilot. Caught up in circumstances beyond her control, she makes an unusual alliance, finds herself pitted against the Hegemony, and discovers that she has powers in excess of anything anyone expected.

All in all, a satisfying read and much more interesting than is usual in science fantasy blends. Scott makes the most of her talents in this book - pity it's out of print, but many libraries will have a copy.

(NB: Five-Twelfths of Heaven is the first in a trilogy - the sequels are Silence in Solitude and The Empress of Earth - that should definitely be read in order.)

5-12ths of Heaven is the first in a trilogy (Silence in Solitude, Empress of Earth). The first book gets our heroine (Silence Leigh) into trouble, the next book gets her out of getting chased all over the Hegemony but even more deeply obligated, and the third book gets her out of trouble altogether and ties up all the loose ends.

I don't think the quality of 5-12ths of Heaven is *quite* on the same level as the two sequels, but that may be because the book is so occupied with getting Silence into *trouble* that it comes off as a little too relentless. Some of the scenes could have been written with a touch more humor which would have helped the overall flow.

On the other hand, Scott's description of the space drive used is absolutely otherworldly, fantastic, and wonderfully poetic. You will find yourself rereading these books over and over again simply for the descriptions of the travel alone.

Other scenes that come to mind--Silence's testing to become a practitioner (extra meaning for those of us who have gone through a thesis defense!), the flying of the Earth road, the trip via the portolan, and the trip into Man's Island by trans.

It's unfortunate that these books are out of print--I and a friend of mine immediately snap up any copies we ever find at used book stores to keep on hand as gifts for friends who appreciate good SF. I hope that some publisher will reprint them.

This is the second of Melissa Scott's Five-Twelves of Heaven trilogy (Five-Twelves of Heaven, Silence in Solitude, and Empress of Earth) and a dandy book it is, too. Scott's description of space drives depending on "harmony" and Neo-Platonic imagery is as marvelous as ever, but it's the plot that really moves this book along. Little touches, like Silence's relationship with her husbands, or the description of the life in the Women's Palace, bring this story very much alive. Silence is a maga in training, a woman in concealment, always trying to get out of the maze the events in book 1 have led her in to. (slight spoiler) By the end of the book, she and her husbands have come to a certain arrangement with the Hegemony, which leads into the events in the last book. It's probably my favorite book of the trilogy--I was working on my doctorate at the time of reading it, so empathized heartily with some of Solitude's experiences!

Basically, this book takes the plot of Scott's earlier novel Trouble and Her Friends, and changes the technology a little. Instead of netwalking and criminal hacking, it's about people who spread misinformation over the internet as their profession. This is an interesting idea, and could have made a very good short story or novella. But Scott takes it and makes a thriller around it, complete with a villain. It reminded me of The Fugitive.

I have to admit I never finished reading this book. After half of it, I decided that the plot wasn't nearly strong enough, the characters weren't alive, and the setting was too mundane to keep my interest. Compared to Trouble, the tech in this book is peanuts - the computers aren't too much further along than those we have today - and not much else has changed. Such near-future settings can work, obviously, but there wasn't enough substance here.

I would love to see this idea - the jazz - rewritten in a shorter format. As the basis for a novel, I don't think it's strong enough; especially not as the basis for a thriller like this book wants to be.

Melissa Scott's "The Jazz" is a smart, hip look at the future of the Internet and the future of entertainment media in our culture, and where the two shall meet. The term "jazz" refers to the placement of false or hoax information on the net, which among the elite is considered to be an artform. Keyz, a 16 year old hoping to become a jazz "player", hacks something he shouldn't and ends up on the run. Lucky for him, he's helped by Tin Lizzy, an experienced player who knows the streets, both cyber and real.

My only minor quibbles are that Keyz is underdevloped as a character, and the ending is a little too quick to be satisfying. Tin Lizzy is well-rendered, however, and the descriptions of surfing the net are truly interesting. It's not hard to believe that the future Scott describes may be the way we're headed. For another, different version of the future Internet, I also recommend Shariann Lewitt's "Interface Masque".

Melissa Scott consistently turns out the best visualizations of our cyber future, and has done so again with "The Jazz." From the effects of Internet postings to the future of gated communities, Ms. Scott has them all in "The Jazz." I always look forward to Ms. Scott's latest books, which fluently integrate believable techno worlds into plots that keep you reading.

Scott has written an interesting, but typical mainstream book. I'm not sure it rates all the accolades it seems to draw. I've been a devotee of cyberpunk, sci-fi, and hard edged writing for along time. Net writing needs to be fast, tight, and with a continuous edge to it. This isn't.

There are some great sections in this book: they're hard, and fast, and flowing, with great potential for visualization. Yet they appear to be bound together with afterthought. It reads as if Scott wrote several strong scenes and then loosely tied them together. I found myself looking ahead of my place on more than one occasion, especially with the repetative net node descriptions, and was able to loose neither plot nor character development.

So I rate this fair. It's a good read but nothing special.

My only other comment is a question. Are we being set up, during the denouement, for the return of Trouble? As a shorter story I hope so.

Well, the first thing to mention about this book is the timing. It was published in 1994, I believe, a decade after Neuromancer started the cyberpunk genre. So just about every piece of science and technology Scott uses should be very familiar to readers. (Another similar flaw is that the book is set a century from now, but the computer systems aren't nearly advanced enough).

The story is basically a thriller with some science fiction behind it. Trouble, a retired hacker (a la William Gibson's Case) returns to the business to track down a hacker who is using her name and reputation. She meets up with her ex-girlfriend, and they travel across the country on their mission. This isn't that bad, and Scott's settings and descriptions are interesting enough, but the whole thing ends up in an action climax and a too-happy ending that doesn't seem real at all.

The virtual reality sequences are another problem. By the time Scott wrote this, personal computer were much more widespread than in Gibson's day, so she's weighed down by reality. Sometimes it's like reading about some guy using a modern computer, which is in no way exciting or interesting. She writes these scenes in present tense, but sometimes forgets and slips into past tense.

The characters weren't bad, except Scott is constantly forcing out feminist and gay issues with absolutely no subtlety. Feminist and gay issues certainly have a place in science fiction, and even in this book, but the symbolism was just too obvious and far-fetched.

If you've read any book by William Gibson or Bruce Sterling, Trouble and Her Friends will be too familiar, and it isn't worth the energy required to get through Scott's always-troublesome first 50 pages.

This book has truly possessed me. I read this book on or about the time I was getting on-line for the first time. I was drawn to the rendering of the computer's concepts into concrete form. I had been told that you could become anything or anybody on the Net. To think of things like firewalls and nodes, interlinks and intralinks. The idea of having to "police" the Net. Then came this book. I now have a visual image of the Net I did not have prior to Trouble. This is a very good read. I could not put it down. I actually have now purchased the entire Melissa Scott catalogue behind this book. This book, Dreamships, The Heaven Trilogy and A Game Beyond are signature books in the genre of cyberpunk. If you have a chance, try and read them all, though they won't be easy to find. It is worth it to try

This is a novel which touches on bits and pieces of things which could be far more interesting, but it never really goes anywhere special. It felt more like a juvenile book than the author's other work- I'd recommend it for precocious junior high students.

I was often annoyed by the very poor editing of this book. It's rife with grammar and spelling mistakes which essentially act like reading speed bumps. The author also has a habit of inserting lengthy statements into the middle of sentences by hyphenating them - often at awkward places, and often several lines in length, in fact sometimes quite a bit longer than this one, making sentences rather hard to follow- when a separate sentence would be much cleaner. By the end of the book, I was pretty tired of having to reread the beginnings of sentences due to this.

Another bad habit which pops up throughout the book is the unexplained use of made-up words. Apparently the author feels that to stop and explain every new term would bog things down, which is true, but instead of limiting her use of meaningless words, she just throws them around and lets the reader's imagination go at them. While this is fine to some extent, there is too much of it in this book. There are lists of names of cyberspace denizens which serve no purpose at all. On the other hand, I would have liked more description of some of the terms, like "hypothecary". The main character is studying to become one, and the reader learns a bit about it through her actions, but still many questions are left unanswered. The reader would have been better served by more description of the important terms and less use of the meaningless ones.

The cyberspace concept here is fairly original, although like almost every other cyberspace in SF, it's too far removed from the reality of electronic information to be believable to anyone with a technical background. The portrayal of software personified as flora and fauna is an interesting one in concept, but the execution goes wa! y too far in giving data the attributes of physical objects or creatures. Too many times I found myself wondering why things would have developed the way they had in the book.

Like most of the author's protagonists, the main characters are gay, although unlike some of her other work, that point is irrelevant to the story. This book isn't about gay characters, it's about characters who happen to be gay. Unfortunately, these gay heroes are all pretty one-dimensional. Except for Ista, the main protagonist, practically no background is given for any of the characters. Even Ista's origins are a mystery to both the characters and the reader. Likewise, the only growth or development any of the characters experience in the book is the occasional reference to Ista's budding romantic feelings towards her friend Stinne. Even this doesn't go anywhere- the situation between them is basically the same at the end of the book as at the beginning.

All in all, this book was a decent effort, but no single aspect of it really held my attention for very long. Even the ending was something of a letdown- it felt like the author wasn't sure how she should end it and ended up leaving too much unresolved. It screams "sequel". Unfortunately there are too many books on the shelf better than this one for me to continue with this story.

In Melissa Scott's best novels, the background - the world setting - is much more interesting than the plot. This is especially true in Night Sky Mine.

In the far-future universe of the book, programs are no longer written, they're bred. They've been equipped with replication, attack, and defense code, and they live in the invisible world, preying on and interbreeding with other programs to form new ones. In the wildnets, programs interbreed at will, and are subject to evolutionary pressure - the wildnets are essentially a virtual ecosystem. Unfortunately, this opens up both the possibilities for useless or undesirable programs and the outside chance that a superprogram will evolve.

Ista, the main character, is an apprentice hypothecary, one who harvests wild program and analyzes code. She's lived for almost all her life in the coporation-owned Audumla system. She knows nothing of her antecedents; at age two, Ista was the sole survivor of a mineship attack, and was adopted by her rescuer. Without knowledge of her parents, she is not a legal citizen, so when she meets two men who are investigating mineship disasters, she has to help them. Together, they expose an illegal wild breeding effort and put themselves in danger.

The characters are likeable and fairly realistic. Ista is a streetwise adolescent, but definitely still not fully adult, and by far the most full-fleshed of the characters. The relationships between the characters are, at least in the first half, both believeable and understandable. (For example, Sein and Justin, the two men, fight the way long term couples fight.) In the second half, the characters are subsumed by the plot, which is unfortunate.

Good Scott novels leave you wanting to know more about the world, the setting, and this one is no exception. Although the plot is interesting enough to hold attention, it's really just a framework for exploring the universe. The book would have been better had the plot been more complex - and the book quite a bit longer - but it's a great SF read nonetheless.

I have not been disappointed in Ms. Scott'swriting abilities yet. Absolutely wonderful!!!At last, someone has created gay heroes who behave like "real" people. Not stereotypes.Her characters are real, her writing is clear.Your time will not be wasted.

At first blush, I was intrigued by the situation this book presented. I was looking forward to a really good read, but unfortunately I was disappointed by the way Scott handled her plot. The action plodded when I wanted it to move quickly, and then sped through a lot that I thought needed more attention. The last fifth of the book, in my eyes, deserved four-fifths of the page count, and vice versa. To balance all that, I did enjoy the descriptions of the technology for the most part, and the environment in particular. The overall plot was good, even allowing for the odd expansion/compression mentioned above. As a whole, however, it just wasn't enough to draw me all the way in.

Melissa Scott did an excellent job examining aspects of society and technology. Once you get past all the technical terms you can get so much out of it. I love the ironic ending as well. I had to reread it just to make sure I had read it correctly. I highly recommend this book to people who enjoy challenging their minds to comprehend things they've never even thought of before.

I had read "Dreaming Metal" before I read this book and picked up "Dreamships" in anticipation. I was a little disappointed. I felt the book moved slowly at the beginning, although I liked the concept of piloting a ship using virtual images. I knew from reading "Dreaming Metal" what some of the plot had to be, and found the confrontation between Reverdy and Manfred to be tamer than I had expected.

Overall, the technology and the relationships between the people in this story kept me interested enough to finish the book.