Interface Masque
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A hard SF novel of high-end data manipulation in a baroque future Venice.
In the ancient and future city of Venice, poised above the drifting tides of her canals, is House Sept-Fortune: a guild specializing in the making and breaking of data systems. Cecilie is a senior apprentice in Sept-Fortune, on the brink of her adult career. It is time for Cecilie's last test, the one that will prove her mastery of her profession and end her apprenticeship. But she has not anticipated the nature of the test that will be required of her.
Frightened and furious, Cecilie plunges into a very secret, very private, very dangerous quest to discover the nature of her world, behind its disguises... and to discover as well who runs the world. The truth is elusive but she knows it's out there, in the flow of the datastream and in the equally unfathomable eddies and currents of Venice's masked intrigues. And all interfaces are masks that cover the underlying system... but masks are hidden face.
No matter. Truth is something Cecilie desperately needs. And she will pursue it in the face of all peril and strangeness, breaking through from one set of appearances to another... and another... to find what lies beyond.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in a neo-Baroque Venice of the future, this novel combines cyberpunk trappings and coming-of-age themes into a potent package. Cecilie, a senior apprentice to the powerful Sept-Fortune house, must pass a test in data manipulation that challenges everything she has been taught about reality. At the same time, Lina, a musician, makes the discovery that the primary instrument of social control in this future Venice, music, is not doing its job properly. Cecilie and Lina encounter disillusionment, then each other, then murder, corruption and consequent danger to their lives as well as to their convictions. Lewitt (Momento Mori) creates a detailed if not always plausible world with an admirably lived-in quality and a large cast of well-developed characters. Readers must work hard to suspend disbelief; but once they do, they'll relish Lewitt's high literary craftmanship.
