Night Sky Mine

by Melissa Scott

Book Overview

Ista Kelly, a foundling and the sole survivor of a pirate raid on an asteroid mine, journeys through a complex futuristic society, a world in which one's official identity is all important, in search... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312858752
• ISBN13: 9780312858759
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Tor Books
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

SciFI at it's best

Melissa Scott has a habit of writing novels that are well put together and thick with possibility and meaning. Skilled in presenting conflict and resolutions that seem human in a future universe, this novel presents a solar system with; asteroid mining, computer programs that evolve, a strangely abandoned asteroid and child, that comes together in a well crafted mystery that asks some of the eternal questions about the meaning of humanity, and the interaction of self and society.

Not Free SF Reader

Night Sky Mine involves a society where computer programs have their own biology and biosphere, so must be carefully regulated, with only licenced experts allowed to deal with them, and trading in them is a crime. A young woman is apprenticed to one of these practitioners, and becomes involved in a case that two of the local police end up investigating. A nearby asteroid complex has been abandoned, and no-one knows why. The police think there are higher corporate and political forces at work, here, and set out to discover what is going on.

Light reading, fun setting

In Melissa Scott's best novels, the background - the world setting - is much more interesting than the plot. This is especially true in Night Sky Mine.In the far-future universe of the book, programs are no longer written, they're bred. They've been equipped with replication, attack, and defense code, and they live in the invisible world, preying on and interbreeding with other programs to form new ones. In the wildnets, programs interbreed at will, and are subject to evolutionary pressure - the wildnets are essentially a virtual ecosystem. Unfortunately, this opens up both the possibilities for useless or undesirable programs and the outside chance that a superprogram will evolve. Ista, the main character, is an apprentice hypothecary, one who harvests wild program and analyzes code. She's lived for almost all her life in the coporation-owned Audumla system. She knows nothing of her antecedents; at age two, Ista was the sole survivor of a mineship attack, and was adopted by her rescuer. Without knowledge of her parents, she is not a legal citizen, so when she meets two men who are investigating mineship disasters, she has to help them. Together, they expose an illegal wild breeding effort and put themselves in danger.The characters are likeable and fairly realistic. Ista is a streetwise adolescent, but definitely still not fully adult, and by far the most full-fleshed of the characters. The relationships between the characters are, at least in the first half, both believeable and understandable. (For example, Sein and Justin, the two men, fight the way long term couples fight.) In the second half, the characters are subsumed by the plot, which is unfortunate. Good Scott novels leave you wanting to know more about the world, the setting, and this one is no exception. Although the plot is interesting enough to hold attention, it's really just a framework for exploring the universe. The book would have been better had the plot been more complex - and the book quite a bit longer - but it's a great SF read nonetheless.

In a word, Excellent!

I have not been disappointed in Ms. Scott'swriting abilities yet. Absolutely wonderful!!!At last, someone has created gay heroes who behave like "real" people. Not stereotypes.Her characters are real, her writing is clear.Your time will not be wasted.

Cyberpunk novel with homosexual social issues.

One of the strengths of Melissa Scott's science fiction is her ability to create a technologically complex world and then fill it with all the social nuances of a real society through her complex characters. In her latest book, Night Sky Mine Ms. Scott has once again created engaging characters that I would love to hang with. Within this world the complexity of computer programs has progressed past the point of human understanding and the programs themselves, called hammals, have taken the next evolutionary step towards Artificial Intelligence by breeding, exchanging with, and scavenging other programs. The habitat for these hammals became known as the invisible world, a vivid three dimensional icon-filled world interpreted and displayed via the lens. Tarasov Sein, an officer in the Patrol, and his Union lover Rangsey Justin are posing undercover as members of the Traveler class and investigating the strange disappearances and destructions of Mining platforms in the system's astroid belt. The relationship between Tarasov and Rangsey is genuinely real; they are each filled with their own class biases but are still deeply in love with each other. Ista Kelly, a teenager who was found as a baby on an abandoned mine, is living on the Company-owned space station Agglomeration and studying to become a hypothecary, the profession of wrangling the hammals of the wildnets. Without parents and not enough money to buy legal identification she is stuck on the station. Her best friend and the object of her affection, Stinne, lives upstation with her family in the Company quarters. Together, in searching for Ista's history and parentage they cross paths with Tarasov and Rangsey's undercover operation. Can the foursome track down the mystery behind Night Sky Mines? Melissa Scott has previously written Trouble and Her Friends and Shadow Man.