The Mumpsimus

Strange Horizons has posted my review of Melissa Scott's Trouble and Her Friends , recently re-issued by Tor. I went in expecting to love the book, or at least enjoy it, because my admiration for the novel Scott published after Trouble , Shadow Man , is boundless. (I've called it "one of the great science fiction novels of the past 25 years," and I do believe that.) Unfortunately, and much to my sadness, I didn't think Trouble and Her Friends  has survived the years quite as well.

I've long been fond of Heather McHugh's poetry, and have even longer been fond of collage-type poems, so I was particularly delighted to read her collage-poem of cyberspeak, "Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies" in a recent issue of The New Yorker : A beige toaster is a maggotbox. A bit bucket is a data sink. Farkled is a synonym for hosed. Flamage is a weenie problem. That's just the first stanza. I was hooked right from there, but once it continued to "In MUD s one acknowledges/ a bonk with an oif./ (There’s a cosmic bonk/oif balance.)" I was totally in thrall -- the sky turning to the color of a screaming live TV wouldn't have kept me from continuing to read. The ending achieves perfection: both hilarious and somehow, strangely, ineffably ... sad. I probably especially enjoyed the poem because I actually understand some of the terminology -- for instance, the title makes perfect sense to me, and the last lines evoke emotion not only because their rh...