From /tmp/sf.4258 Tue Feb 1 03:56:44 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!pipex!uunet!news!dg-rtp!sheol!dont-reply-to-paths From: reeder@reed.edu (P. Douglas Reeder) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Review of "Virtual Girl" by Amy Thomson Approved: sfr%sheol@concert.net (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: Date: 19 Sep 93 21:37:04 GMT Lines: 54 "Virtual Girl" by Amy Thomson review copyright 1993 by P. Douglas Reeder This novel starts out very tritely. It feels like Thomson is checking off a list: Solitary Genius; Rich, Domineering Father; Escape; Pursuit; Genius Creates Humanoid Robot; Artificial Intelligence Illegal; Flight from Minions of Evil Figure (robot plans lost); Assault; Characters Separated and Presumed Dead; Amnesia; Sheltered by Kindly Stranger... None of the individual elements are utterly impossible, but Thomson fails to make them believable. I am willing to believe, for the purposes of a story, that a self-learning Artificial Intelligence could be created by a lone worker, in spite of it being illegal. That such an intelligence could learn to use a body in a matter of days is absurd. Humans take years to do so. The largest problem with the book is that Maggie doesn't act like a robot; she acts like a human in a tin suit. It is implausible that an entity who came to self-awareness by such a different route than humans would behave so much like them. So many authors have missed this point: robots are not human, they are aliens. It was a long time before aliens in science fiction were depicted as truly alien -- I hope we shall not have as long to wait before robots are as well. (A short aside: Asimov's robots followed the Three Laws of Robotics, making them convincing robots, but they were not fully developed characters. For that matter, Asimov's humans weren't fully developed characters, either.) Much of the action takes place among the homeless. What Thomson does depict is believable, but she is selective -- for all the characters' wandering among the homeless, they never meet any weirdos or drug addicts. It doesn't bother me that this story has been done before; the problem is that there is no life, no originality, for all that Thomson uses all the latest buzzwords: Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, expert Computer Hackers. The characters act like characters in a book, not like real people. %A Amy Thomson %T Virtual Girl %I Ace Books / The Berkely Publishing Group %C New York, NY %D copyright 1993 %G ISBN 0-441-86500-3 %P 248 pp %K SF, robot, homeless %O paperback $4.99 Doug Reeder Internet: reeder@reed.edu Div, Grad & Curl USENET: ...!tektronix!reed!reeder From /tmp/sf.4258 Tue Feb 1 03:59:00 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!uunet!news!dg-rtp!sheol!dont-reply-to-paths From: tak@hitl.washington.edu (Andrew Hamlin, co Squish) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Review: Virtual Girl by Amy Thompson Approved: sfr%sheol@concert.net (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Organization: Human Interface Technology Laboratory Message-ID: Date: 19 Sep 93 21:37:16 GMT Lines: 71 by Andrew Hamlin Virtual Girl a novel by Amy Thomson New York: Ace Books, 1993 (248 pgs) When I met Amy Thomson, author of this novel about a middle-aged nerd who synthesizes a beautiful woman and loses control of her, I asked if she'd ever seen _Weird Science_, a film about two young nerds who synthesize a beautiful woman and lose control of her. No, she said, a friend of hers was going to show her that movie now that she'd finished the book, but she worked from the story of Pygmalion -- "with a twist". Reading _Virtual Girl_ showed me how inaccurate the _Weird Science_ comparison was. Although they sprang from that Pygmalion myth, the film sells itself with sex as the youth pictures of the 1980s did, uninterested in the nuance of sex sensation or the subtext of sex as power (something _Risky Business_, the best of those films, held up for inspection with zeal-- not preparing to eat the meat, but admiring how the grease shone in the light)._Virtual Girl_'s protagonist Maggie watches a man having sex with her and "began to understand why humans feared and desired sex so much.. She felt more than a little sorry for humans. If this was the closest they could get to each other, they must be very lonely indeed." Thomson refuses to write erotica, and her Maggie never enjoys intercourse. Her liaison with Marie/Murray, a transvestite who's temporarily shed female garb, creates intimacy through acceptance. Marie/Murray casts aside his dress and makeup, Maggie the pretense that she's human; the former remarks that "You didn't expect anything, I could be who I wanted to be." Is she, then, a plastic sex doll with built-in barometers? How much person-to-person sex is sophisticated masterbation? Can "intimacy" be anything but an empty nod to a collective notion? Maggie finds a truer intimacy in the meeting of minds, and although she cannot meet a human's wind as she meets with other artificial intelligences, she takes the same approach; she plunges into sharing with a commitment putting that saccharin snakebeast Barney to shame. We inhabit a postmodern culture where "deep" and "intense" exist only in quotes, exist only to blow up in the mouths of Beavis and Butt-head, or Wayne and Garth, or for that matter Emilio Estivez and Harry Dean Stanton in _Repo Man_, a seamless weave of cool trash that needs an alien invasion to puncture itself. _Virtual Girl_ stays earthbound. Maggie isn't afraid to be that close, and a few humans can meet her halfway. Pat Cadigan, in what's probably her best work, spoke of the "lunatic bridge", where two minds each send half of their substance down that bridge, for a meeting in the middle. Cadigan wrote about the disease of too much intimacy; Thomson stabs at the opposite affliction, and the simple assertion that this bridge even exists, can be trod, carries a pleasantly surprising weight. _Virtual Girl_ has some awkwardness in it, some exposition that is really sermonizing, but in a genre (cyberpunk, yes, I'll say the word) where cool wetware spins like the insane pipers around H.P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, Amy Thomson unfashionably but sagely suggests the presence of sun and moon and stars. Of angels. %A Thompson, Amy %T Virtual Girl %I ACE Science Fiction %C New York %D August 1993 %G ISBN 0-441-86500-3 %P 248 pp. %O paperback, US$4.99 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- comments can reach Andy Hamlin through tak@hitl.washington.edu. -----------------------------------------------------------------------