Subject: Melissa Scott: Dreamships

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1993 21:18:10 GMT

"Dreamships", by Melissa Scott, is out in paperback, and worth reading.
The protagonist, Reverdy Jian, is a pilot who is hired to fly a sophisticated
space ship with *extremely* sophisticated supervisory software.  It's
sophisticated enough, in fact, that those who work with it can't honestly
say that they aren't talking to a 'person', albeit one with electronic
capabilities.  

But a program that can come across as a 'person' is, by some definitions,
'intelligent'.  (A related philosophical problem, concerning weaknesses
in these definitions, is only hinted at, but the author is clearly aware of 
it.)  But suppose a program is intelligent:  Does an intelligent program have
civil rights?

In the world Scott has created, there aren't enough civil rights to go
around, and a thorny philosophical problem becomes a nasty political one.

It's the sort of world science-fiction could use more often, with a
three-dimensionality which is too often lacking.  The world of the
future may have neural interfaces and virtual reality, but it will
also have hotdog stands.  It may have space mining and cheap manufacturing,
but it will also have distribution problems, ethnic tensions, and poverty.
It can have dirty politics *and* law enforcement that's usually effective.
Too much science fiction just takes a single trend and exaggerates it
into unintended caricature.  Scott doesn't ignore the trends, but
neither does she forget to make them part of a world in which people
can live.

Scott pays a price, in conservatism, for this balance:  The technology
and social adjustments she portrays would, for the most part, be more
reasonable if set fifty or a hundred years from now, rather than a 
thousand.  But it's worth it.

The characters are interesting, and the story is good enough to keep
the reader reading, but you'll have gathered that they aren't the main
attractions of the book.  More attractive are the world-building --
a more thoughtful job than we usually see -- and the philosophical
element, which Scott binds into her story without (as happens too often)
letting it dominate the story.

She doesn't offer any pat answers, either.

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope