Proxies

Rating:
Summary: Future-noir with a heart of gold (and buns of steel)
Review: "You don't have to believe me now. Just listen. There will be a woman. Or something that looks like a woman. It will be tall and have an unusual complexion. It's so strong and can move so fast you won't be able to fight or run or even yell for help. It's killed once already and we think it's after you.

"So if you see it, run like hell and pray it hasn't seen you. Got it?"

Rating:
Summary: Old Wine in New Bottles
Review: But the wine sparkles. Mixon takes a classic pulp-fiction mad scientist plot, adds to it a neat political thriller riff, and some cyberpunkiana, and then tarts it up with some perceptive, sometimes tongue-in-cheek speculation on what the world might look like in the mid 21st century (a MacDonalds on an orbital space station is my favorite), makes sure her characters are sexually and ethnically diverse, and serves up a potent brew indeed.

Carli D'Auber is the intrepid heroine who everybody's after, and not always in their own bodies, either (hence the title); the mad scientist and her team are hideously kinky, while Carli's friends are seriously flaky. The multiple point of view plot will leave you dizzy (I doubt even Mixon could have explained it the day she turned it in to her publisher, let alone today), and grasping at loose ends. But no matter. You'll be entertained all the way.

Rating:
Summary: Long And Dull In The Extreme!
Review: If you want to read a lengthy and tedious novel, this one is for you. Set in the mid 21st century, it begins with a group that is striving to take over control of the first intersteller probe with their own people, and it continues in it's own muddling way from there for hundreds of pages. There is a device that permits instantaneous communications between points light years apart, and also technology with the ability to allow one to control human-like proxies at various locations away from ones physical location, their consciousness being projected there, sort of like an advanced version of telepresence. I found the plot very flat, not interesting at all really, and much of the writing, it seemed to me, was just filler. A lot of the time, particularly in the first half of the novel, I found it hard to follow which groups were doing what, very confusing. In my spare time I read a lot of science fiction, this novel is one of the poorer ones that I have read, not recommended at all.

Rating:
Summary: Proxies is a wonderful example of Modern Cyberpunk!
Review: Proxies extends the ideas Mixon presented in her earlier novel, Glass Houses. Both books show characters manipulating robots remotely through a computer interface, but in Proxies, the characters come out of the gutter, the traditional home of cyberpunk, and go into secret back hallways of governmental intrigue. Proxies not only gives a rich, wonderfully detailed depiction of the future, it also includes a great murder mystery and a politcal thriller. Add to that a touch of romance, a bit of multiple-personality dissorder, and the usual cyberpunk street scenes, and you have this fabulous novel. Although parts of this book are somewhat confusing to read because of the way Mixon chooses to represent certain characters' thoughts, the fabulous conclusion is definately worth the effort. I highly recommend this novel and recommend that people who enjoy it try Pat Cadigan's TEA FROM AN EMPTY CUP, Melissa Scott's THE SHAPES OF THEIR HEARTS, or N. Lee Wood's LOOKING FOR THE MAHDI. Together these four texts point the way towards the future of cyberpunk fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Proxies is a wonderful example of Modern Cyberpunk!
Review: Proxies extends the ideas Mixon presented in her earlier novel, Glass Houses. Both books show characters manipulating robots remotely through a computer interface, but in Proxies, the characters come out of the gutter, the traditional home of cyberpunk, and go into secret back hallways of governmental intrigue. Proxies not only gives a rich, wonderfully detailed depiction of the future, it also includes a great murder mystery and a politcal thriller. Add to that a touch of romance, a bit of multiple-personality dissorder, and the usual cyberpunk street scenes, and you have this fabulous novel. Although parts of this book are somewhat confusing to read because of the way Mixon chooses to represent certain characters' thoughts, the fabulous conclusion is definately worth the effort. I highly recommend this novel and recommend that people who enjoy it try Pat Cadigan's TEA FROM AN EMPTY CUP, Melissa Scott's THE SHAPES OF THEIR HEARTS, or N. Lee Wood's LOOKING FOR THE MAHDI. Together these four texts point the way towards the future of cyberpunk fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Mixed up plot and bad science
Review: There is an excellent guide on Amazon.com for writing science fiction. One of the points made in that guide is to *know* the science and not make mistakes. Laura Mixon messes up badly in several places in this book (and I'm not even halfway through yet). For starters, let's look at one of the key "new science effects" in her book, which provides instantaneous communication across interstellar distances. OK, no problem so far, it's a new effect. But she has one character admit that the invention needs to be used near a planet-sized mass, and the object is used on a spaceship. She tries to patch this up with the fact that the spaceship is accelerating to relativistic speeds, and at "anything over 18 percent of light speed, the spaceship will be massive enough for the effect to work". This is utter nonsense. Anybody with a decent grounding in physics knows that the relativistic effects are highly nonlinear, and you have to be going well over 90% of lightspeed for any significant effect to occur.

In another section, one of her "proxy" androids scans an area for "magnetic fields from capacitance sensors". Huh? For one thing, capacitance sensors won't give off a magnetic field, for another, magnetic fields fall off quite rapidly and cannot be sensed from much of a distance without rather complicated sensors. The fact that the book is mid-21st century doesn't remove her obligation to at least describe how the science might work.

These mistakes alone wouldn't merit a 2-star review, but the plot of the book is an utter mess. Sure, you can confuse the reader for the first few pages, if things start to clear up after that. But her use of "proxy jargon" and attempts to rehash events from viewpoints of various proxies really makes no sense at all. And it isn't just proxy jargon, she even has characters using chat slang such as "imho" (In My Humble Opinion" in speech. This is going to confuse a LOT of people. The characters simply don't make up for the plot mess, either, they are utterly 2-dimensional actors, reciting lines to try to help out the story, and not much else.

I normally have no problem suspending disbelief while reading science fiction, but this book just reads like a high school creative writing project, nothing more.