Subject: Dan Crawford: The Sure Death of a Mouse

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Mon, 7 Feb 1994 01:58:09 GMT

Dan Crawford's "The Sure Death of a Mouse" is a sequel to his earlier
"Rouse a Sleeping Cat".  Well, sort of a sequel -- the setting is the
same, but you don't need to have read the earlier book to read this one.
Like the first book, it's a light fantasy -- well, sort of light, the
humor being of a macabre sort.  The running gag through both books is
the setting itself, the kingdom of Rossacotta.

Rossacotta has, for centuries, been a kingdom of outlaws and brigands.
There's never been a criminal who wasn't welcome there, as long as he
paid his taxes.  In the past half-century, though, it's been trying to
civilize itself.  So far, the veneer of civilization is very thin.
Think of the setting asFrom rec.arts.sf.written Tue Feb  8 00:48:34 1994
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From: [email-masked] (Fred Zimmerman)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: REVIEW--"Chimera", by Mary Rosenblum
Date: 7 Feb 1994 18:24:00 GMT
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%A Rosenblum, Mary
%T Chimera
%I Del Rey
%C New York
%D November 1993
 %G ISBN 0-345-38528-4
 %P 403 pp.
%O paperback, US$4.99

Mary Rosenblum's CHIMERA is set in a future in which most
business communication takes place in a global network of
"virtual offices".   This novel presents a challenging
exploration of cyberspace as a realm for the presentation of the
self.   In today's business world, we are used to being
evaluated on the basis of such qualities as our body language,
our clothes, our accent, our professed values, and--in
professional America, at any rate--above all on the basis of our
formal educational credentials.  Not many of us are ready for a
world like Rosenblum's, in which we will compete on the basis of
how well our visualization software edits our body language and
presents our chosen image of self, and in which virtual reality
artists are the aristocrats of the global Net.  As a verbal,
book-loving, command-line person whose computing experience
began with Fortran and the Heath Disk Operating System (HDOS)
and who has never much liked the MTVization of the media, I must
say that I hope for a future information environment that is
considerably less visual than Rosenblum's.  But I liked the fact
that her book made me uneasy about the possibilities.

This, Mary Rosenblum's second novel, is a good book, well worth
reading for anyone who is interested in the Internet and
communication via computer.  In the words of the Del Rey
Discovery motto on the inside cover, this "something new" is
"worth the risk."