Standalone Group Read - June - Burning Bright by Melissa Scott

I had intended, starting with the Group Reads of the Raksura, to run group reads of series, both to clear out my own TBR in an efficient manner and to enjoy the experience of a group read for works beyond the scope of a single novel, but when the possibility of interest in a group read of Burning Bright showed up in my reading journal I leapt at the chance to host one. Burning Bright is one of my very favorite books- a standalone space opera about not only politics and intrigue, but art, gaming, and performance.

Governed by two political rulers, the planet Burning Bright is the location of the biggest virtual reality game in the universe. Quinn Lioe is tangled in a web of love and suspense when she becomes determined to play at the center of the virtual reality world and gets stuck in the war between the two empires. This science fiction adventure is one of Scott's best and the complex futuristic world is unforgettable.

This is a deceptively hard novel to summarize, I think. The Game is the form of entertainment of choice in this future of humanity, something like a virtual-reality tabletop RPG where players create and act out scenarios in a massively shared setting. Most of the narrative is on Burning Bright, but we occasionally switch to a narrative of one of Lioe's Game scenarios, played through multiple times with different people in the roles of the characters.

Lioe, a pilot and already a well-respected scenario writer for the Game before the story opens, is unquestionably the main protagonist, but there are other points of view as well: Chauvelin, an ambassador to the Hsai alien race who shares space with humanity; Ransome, Chauvelin's lover and an artist and hacker who used to be one of the most renowned Gamers on Burning Bright but gave up the Game due to his frustration with the limitations of collaborative art; Damian Chrestil, a businessman trying to set himself up for the governorship of Burning Bright by dealing with the Hsai behind Chauvelin's back; and Roscha, a Gamer who also works for Chrestil's company, moving cargo through the mostly-water city with her gondola.

All of this, on a very interesting planet with its own particular culture, in a future where sexism and homophobia are absent, with a backdrop of warring empires- that, for their part, stay mostly in the background- makes for a very interesting read, and one I'm looking forward to discussing with everyone!

I'm really looking forward to reading this. The only other books by Melissa Scott that I've read are the Pointsman ones that she wrote with Lisa Barnett, which I absolutely love. So my expectations are high for Burning bright!

>2 Sakerfalcon: I'm the opposite, I've read a lot of her science fiction, but the Pointsman books still languish in my TBR... Did you see a new one, Fairs' Point, came out last month? I'd hoped to read through the other three before it, but as always the best laid reading plans... I hope you like Burning Bright!

I've not read any Melissa Scott, so I'm excited to be trying her. I'm just finishing up Still Life (hopefully on the commute home), then Burning Bright is already loaded onto my Kindle and raring to go!

A young colleague is lending me the book (Friday he said) so I hope I'll be able to join at least in listening to the discussion.

The first chapter didn't do a lot for me, and the number of different points of view through Part One should have been bewildering, but I seem to have been sucked in :)

Okay, I'm really enjoying this now, even though I've had to back off how much I'm reading as my headache is back so my concentration is shot. Thank you @sandstone78!

>7 imyril: I'm so pleased you're enjoying it, @imyril! I hope that your headache has gone and stays gone.

I think you're right that the first chapter is a little slow- it's not really clear how it ties into things until later, and in fact I'm not sure I picked that up on my first read ages ago.

I plan to try to pick this back up this weekend myself and re-reread for discussion, if all goes well. I think I'll wait until people have made it a ways in before I post my thoughts, though, so as not to spoil things.

>5 LolaWalser: Looking forward to your thoughts on this one, @LolaWalser!

As an aside now I'm belatedly halfway through and realised I'm still being inconsistent about this: how are you all pronouncing Lioe?

I've just started this and am a little way into chapter 2. I was a bit put off by the description of the space ship with "sails" - I can never picture that sort of thing in my head - but now that we're on Burning Bright I think it's going to be good.

Okay, I'll wade in with some initial thoughts as I finished Burning Bright last night...

Firstly - thank you @sandstone78! This is one of my top reads of the year so far. I wasn't familiar with Melissa Scott and I thoroughly enjoyed this introduction.

This reminded me strongly of Polar City Blues, which I'm going to read next as a blast from the past - another human planet caught between 2 superpowers, with buckets of political intrigue and a spice of psi powers (although psis are close to socially outcast) as the backdrop to a murder mystery. It uses an AI subplot (are they self-aware?) in lieu of the Game subplot (can it be changed?) and is basically a whodunnit in space with politics and aliens.

Speaking of the Game - I used to be a rp gamer, and the joy of a great session was equally the pain of a poor one: the magic of collaborative creativity blossoms based on equal ability and commitment from all involved. Weak links (or self-involved ones) can bring down a session and derail a scenario, no matter how determined or creative the person/people in charge (although the Game appears more tolerant of railroading than gamers I have met). I recognised Lioe's frustration with her players, and Ransome's decision to embrace an art form that gave him total control of his stories - I went from playing to writing scenarios back to writing fiction for the same reasons. Give me one thing that rings so totally true, and I'll swallow everything else more or less wholesale ;) ...not that I had to suspend much disbelief elsewhere, but I didn't go looking for holes.

So I didn't find myself questioning gondolas, helicopters or bicycles as means of getting around a future city (because why should you adopt lots of future tech when some of our current tech is highly efficient for navigating cities? Especially canal-based cities. Especially ones that presumably have limited energy available to them) - and I did find myself making assumptions about energy generation, food sources and so on that the text often validated in passing (rice paddies, seaweed, fish, wind and wave generation). I couldn't begin to guess how far in the future this was meant to be; if it's our future at all. It doesn't really matter - it doesn't get in the way of the story. In retrospect though, I'm curious to know what you all thought on this point?

I liked that sexuality just wasn't a thing. Sleep with whoever you are attracted to. Don't get possessive.

I spent a good deal of the book trying to decide whether Damian Chrestil was actually a villain or whether my perceptions were being coloured by Ransome's perspective on the Chrestil family in general; I love that sort of ambiguity, and I liked how Scott handled it through to the end. It also occurred to me near the end when Chauvelin was agonising over whether to try and rescue Ransome at the potential cost of his status and career whether I would actually have much time for Chauvelin if I'd met him from another perspective. Ji-Imbaoa had no redeeming features, but at that late stage it occurred to me that Chauvelin's overriding characteristic was his dedication to the Hsai Empire and his duty, all of which is very admirable, but not particularly sympathetic (as we've not seen a lot about the Hsai to make that seem particularly rational).

I'd love to revisit this universe - so much of the background is sketched in and even implied (it just sort of works and hangs together - unless that's my wilful suspension of disbelief again - I do do that when I've been sucked in, in which case top marks to Scott, she reduced me to a 14-year-old with no critical faculties), and I'd love to explore it in more detail. We find out nothing about the Republic, other than that they're human. Quality of life, politics, economics, demographics, religion, social structure are entirely absent - other than the existence of some sort of social services that take care of Quinn as a child. We learn more about the eastern-styled Hsai culture, without ever learning very much.

My only nitpick was that the climax didn't feel entirely climactic, but this may have been me being really far too tired. I know I should have put the book down, gone to sleep, and finished it this morning but there was no way that was going to happen :)

I finished this last night as I just couldn't stop reading it. I loved the worldbuilding, and agree with Imyril that we get a strong feel for the universe despite not actually being told a whole lot about it - no infodumps, yay! I liked the glimpses of the art and culture of Burning Bright - puppetry, Ransome's story-eggs and most obviously the Game, and love the idea of the Carnival that coincides with storm season, when the city basically shuts down and parties. The way Scott used the Game in the plot was excellent, and I liked the three scenes we see, each subtly different because of the different players. All the characters felt like real individuals, no-one totally good or bad and all with realistic motives. I liked that Lioe was street-smart without being super-tough or invulnerable; she knows she can take care of herself, but still acts with caution.

I too would love to see more of this world; it seems to hold the potential for many more stories. But for now I have Trouble and her friends and Shadow man waiting. Thanks, @sandstone78, for the push I needed to get this off the Tbr pile!

I'm so pleased you both enjoyed it! :)

Scott's settings are some of my very favorite. They feel lived-in in a way that many authors' settings don't quite achieve to me- I feel like I know more about life on Burning Bright after this one volume than I do about Cherryh's atevi homeworld after reading fourteen books in her Foreigner series, for example. (By coincidence, I believe Foreigner came out less than a year after Burning Bright- Chauvelin and Cherryh's Bren make an interesting contrast, with some interesting chance parallels like using ribbons to signify things.)

I love that daily life takes up so much space here- transportation, meals, shopping, holidays and the weather and the turning of the season, work and hobbies. I think a different author might have given a lot more space to explicating the politics of the Hsai factions and the Hsai relationship to humanity, the Chrestil family's scheming, the race for the governorship of Burning Bright, the differences between Alliance humans and Jericho-humans and independent worlds- any number of things, but Scott leaves these firmly in the background, almost sketched in- but not shaky or inconsistent or occurring just to move the plot, to my reading, just beyond the scope or interest of the characters, or things they know so well that it doesn't come up.

There is enough material here for many books, easily, but I'm not sure I'd like a continuation- this story feels complete in and of itself to me, and things are resolved; I can work out what's going to happen to these characters based on their personalities as established and what we're told about the setting, so anything more explicit I think would feel gratuitous. I definitely wouldn't object to something else in the setting though. (I wouldn't object to a prequel about Ransome, who seems to have the most unexplored backstory, either. Also, why is his nickname I-Jay, anyways? I don't think that's ever explained.)

This was, as I think I mentioned over in my thread when I reread this back in February, one of the first books I read with normative fluid sexuality, and it remains probably the best executed to me. Most books promising a sexuality-blind society that I've picked up fall disappointingly into the trope of "everyone is bisexual, 50% attracted to men and 50% attracted to women, but somehow all of the large cast of main characters ends up paired off in male-female couples except for maybe one token same-sex couple in a supporting role or someone mentioned as having parents both of the same gender- who never show up on-screen or matter to the plot in any way- for diversity cookies." (I'm not bitter. Okay, maybe I am.)

It's curious, though, that the institution of marriage seems not to have the importance it does in present-day society. I searched the text of my ebook and found only one reference to it, Chrestil thinking that Cella looks like "a salarywife welcoming her corporate husband home."

The thing that stands out with your comments on the setting, @imyril, is how little this book has really dated. It was published in 1993- twenty-one years ago now. I think it might have possibly been our future then, but it isn't now- there are no smartphones, no tablets or even laptops, nor is there social media or anything of the kind. (Trouble and Her Friends is even more of an alternate future- one with cybernetic implants, but no wireless internet.)

I'd like to discuss the characters a little more in another post, but right now I want to bring up a question I've long had about the ending:

The last Game scene- it couldn't have happened as written, because Ambidexter was... not available to play Avellar at the time, but nor did he play Avellar earlier in the timeline either- all of the game sessions up to that point were excerpted already.

How did you read that? Purely as a might-have-been? Someone other than Ransome playing as Ambidexter? But the actions and reasoning are so characteristic of Ransome to me that I don't think that could be the case- in fact, the whole scene is bound up in him and Chauvelin, and his own personal limitations.

But the scene seems to have a real effect, ending the stasis of the Game, as Lioe and Ransome discussed before- in the last scene, Day 16, Lioe says that the new Game was going to begin that night. At least, that's how it's always read to me- that last interlude was the proper ending of the Game, the canonical play of that scenario, and the Game was now going to move forward. Possibly Scott just left that event offscreen? Or, Lioe mentions putting Ransome's death bringing down the Empire at the heart of the New Game right before that-

The Game scenes in and of themselves are interesting because they give an interiority to the characters, letting us in on their thoughts and inner monologue the way that the video recordings we see of sessions of the Game couldn't possibly capture- unless the players are narrating this as they go along? The Game scenes are all fully in-Game-world, though, not seeming to recognize the existence of the players except for telling us who's playing who.

>9 imyril: I've never figured out for sure how to pronounce Lioe either. I kind of end up reading it as "Lee oh" which I'm sure isn't right. I wish this was available in audiobook...

>12 Sakerfalcon: I love that Lioe's competence and skill is just an unquestioned fact too, and I felt the same about Chauvelin when I re-read it- from my first read ages ago, I had an impression of him as an unambiguously good character, but I don't think that's really right. Roscha mentions the same thing in the epilogue. But then Chauvelin had ji-Imbaoa killed, a surprising and very satisfying twist. What Chrestil did to Cella seems unambiguously overkill, though, and put him firmly on the villain side for me, even over and above sending thugs after Ransome.

I'm still sorting out about my feelings about the female characters in this novel overall, though, actually- Lioe is cool, but I don't feel like I got to know her as well as I did Ransome, Chauvelin, and Chrestil; Roscha similarly seems a bit flat beyond "spunky worker" and sort of a reward for Lioe- a means to "direct action" and power as Lioe reflects on the boat; and Cella is just one-dimensionally evil and ignorant- I'm glad that we have Lioe's competence to balance out Cella's "incompetent woman messing in affairs that are too much for her."

You're absolutely right - Burning Bright feels very lived-in and (this is a crucial one for me) like a functioning / functional society; the little details (from food, to nosy staff, to the women struggling to get a shop battened down for the storm) just add that colour that help you take it for granted. The broader setting is almost irrelevant to this particular story, so it suffices that we get just enough hints to carry us through, but it too feels consistent - there's clearly been plenty of thought given to it, even if it's only sketched in. It's the broader setting I'd be keen to explore further rather than the specific characters, although I agree that Ransome's background could be a good way to do it (I-Jay - I from Illario, presumably, but where does that Jay come from? No idea! Perhaps he has a middle name we never learn? Or part of a Hsai naming convention? Doesn't a 'je' come into that?)

I'm so glad you brought up the final scenario - this bothered me too. I couldn't decide whether someone played as Ambidexter (if so, my money would be on Lioe herself - there doesn't seem to be a deal made about identification, so presumably Lioe could mimic his style and run Ambidexter playing Avellar as well as the scenario itself, although it would keep her very busy), or whether the scenario was shown out of chronological sequence, which seemed less likely.

With regard to the inner monologue of characters in-session, I hadn't really thought about this at the time. I think I'd read this as Lioe's interpretation of what people were thinking/feeling: as the person running the scenario, her interpretation becomes canon (not least because she can - to a certain extent - control what happens in response). It would feel very false (anti-immersive) if people were calling this out inside a VR environment, although another thing I never quite decided was just how immersive / real the Game felt to the players.

I agree that Roscha and Cella are thin (Cella critically so - did I miss an explanation of why she hated Ransome and/or Chauvelin so much? - although I read her as naive rather than ignorant, and crucially seems to feel she is Damian's partner rather than his subordinate, which is a critical mistake), but the peripheral cast had more memorable women than men for me - Chauvelin's senior Eriki Haas and his steward Iameis; Gueremei at Shadows; Gelsomina the mask-maker.

The more I think about Cella, the more I start to feel for her. She's not a major character (we don't get any scenes from her perspective), and she's fairly wooden and unpleasant as a minor character: spiteful, mannered, and unclear in her motivations and competence. Damian calls her competence into question at the end, but this is at least partly spite (it would be fairer to call her judgement into question; she's been very competent at achieving her aims ;) He isn't interested in her 'byzantine' solutions and when she pursues them regardless, she pays the price largely because she inconveniences him (she hasn't explicitly disobeyed him, they just disagree on whether Ransome alive is crucial to any successful outcome). Because we don't ever see things from her point of view, we can't judge what she thought to achieve or whether it might have worked.

Regardless, Damian no longer trusts her. Ultimately, Cella knows too much about his affairs for him to ever be able to safely end their association - we can see she's vindictive, after all - but Scott avoids this (Damian doesn't need excuses), and focuses purely on Damian's sore pride that Cella tried to force his hand and complicated his affairs as his reason to kill her. It's wildly out of proportion, as is her unpleasant death - so we can finally be clear that he's an evil self-serving villain, not a morally ambiguous antagonist. Which, if you read him as equivalent to the Baron in the Game, is entirely appropriate, but leaves Cella as a plot device and not a character at all. So, unexpectedly and only in retrospect, I feel for her (but it no means to the detriment of my enjoyment of the novel!)

As an aside on pronunciation, I ended up going with Li-oo, but occasionally my brain dumped in Li-oy (although I really don't think there's any Welsh influence on Burning Bright!), which was very jarring. I don't recommend it as an option ;)

>14 imyril: Hmm. That ending scene couldn't have been out of sequence, with it really being Ransome, because we see all of the Game sessions Lioe runs from when she gets on Burning Bright to the end. I thought maybe the answer is in the notation at the top of the Game interludes, but if there is I can't puzzle it out:

Game/varRebel.2.04/subPsi.1.22/ver22.1/ses1.26

Game/varRebel.2.04/subPsi.1.22/ver22.1/ses4.24

Game/varRebel.2.04/subPsi.1.22/ver22.1/ses7.25

Were there really only three Game interludes? Huh. Feels like a lot more than that. The last number, presumably "session," increments through the three, so the third one does come chronologically last- the numbering seems arbitrary, though, it doesn't line up with Burning Bright's dates. In the story, Interlude 2 occurs during Storm Day 1, and the climax of the story- including what happens to Ransome- occurs on Storm Day 2. Then there's the funeral on Day 6, the Interlude, and Lioe cleaning out Ransome's apartment on Day 16.

Someone else playing Ambidexter would not be a surprise to me given Scott's themes in other books- Trouble and Her Friends, the book she released next, in fact centers around a case of mistaken identity and impersonation online- but I can't imagine that she wouldn't call it out in the text...

You're right that we don't get a good look at the Game from the players' point of view, hmm. I hadn't thought of reading Damian as the analogue to the Baron in the Game before, that's very interesting- I'll have to re-read in the future with a specific eye to the analogues in the Game.

Just rereading the last Interlude, I've noticed Ambidexter's play as Avellar has a whole wealth of implications for Ransome's life- it ties everything together that we've learned about Ransome's nature and background so well that I can't read it as anybody but Ransome in that role, and I can't believe that Lioe would know him so well as to play it like that after only a couple of days.

I like your idea of Lioe deciding what's canon. We don't get a good idea of how the Game community operates- it seems to be a collaborative or consensus work, but I don't recall any mention of any company or organization operating the servers or anything like that, which is interesting. The world isn't persistent like an MMO or, more relevant to the time of writing, a MUD or something like that, but its mythology does persist and evolve. More than anything it feels like a long-running serial story like an American comic book universe that changes writers and retcons or adjusts things as it goes along- the cultural presence of the Game characters feels like the presence superheroes have today in US culture, where even people who don't follow comics know who Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and so on are, and costumes of them are popular at Halloween.

I think you're right that we don't get any scenes from Cella's POV, and that makes her the least fleshed out of the main six. (We get very few from Roscha's too, I think- when we have Lioe and Roscha together, I think Scott tends to write from Lioe's perspective.) Maybe once or twice when she's with Damian? I read her the exact same way, as believing she's Damian's partner when he views her as a disposable amusement or a fling. Chauvelin seems to regard her as Damian's tool as well. She reads to me as trying to use him to further herself and not doing a very good job of it, partly because of her naivete- in some ways, I think she's a counterpart to Ransome in that way, but not so fleshed out or given so much sympathy or interest by the narrative.

There are also interesting parallels between the way Chauvelin treats Ransome and the way Damian treats Cella too- like who ultimately falls on which side of morally ambiguous, or has what redeeming features in their treatment of their lover. I think that ultimately, with the scene on the boat at Ransome's funeral, we see Lioe and Roscha's relationship falling into this pattern a bit as well, at least from Lioe's side- I'm thinking specifically of Lioe reflecting on the power that Roscha offers her when Roscha offers to have the canalli do Lioe favors. It's hard to tell what Roscha thinks, I have to admit that offer seems a little forced, but I'll have to read for Roscha more specifically in the future to see if that was built up more.

Just doing a text search for Cella in my ebook copy, I found a mention that Cella is a well-known Gamer. We don't actually see her playing at all, though, do we? If I remember right, she was trying to create scenarios to lure Ransome back into the Game to keep him distracted, but I don't think anything really came of that, did it? It got him back into Shadows where he met Lioe, it looks like. There could have been some interesting tension between Cella and Lioe as well then from a scenario-writing point of view. I wonder if she had a larger role in earlier versions of the story?

You're certainly right that for whatever its arguable lacks in developing Cella and Roscha, this is not a world where women feel absent due to the rich cast of minor female characters and extras.

I could talk about this book all day. I badly wish it had the coveted status of a genre classic so I could read essays upon essays about it.

I just got a copy of this through interlibrary loan, it sounds interesting from the comments I've seen here!

>15 sandstone78: I tend to agree that it's not out of sequence, and your point about Lioe is well-made, which made me think 'so who knows Ransome well enough?' ... and there's only one candidate: Chauvelin. There are a couple of clues seeded through the book that he does access the Game (and I think it's when he's biting his nails waiting for updates during the storm there's an implication that he might actually go off and play a scenario to distract himself, although it's clear this isn't something he gets to do very often), so this isn't beyond the bounds of possibility. It also plays reasonably well with the ways in which the Game characters mirror the real world characters - if Avellar's actions in that final scenario mirror Ransome's life far too well, Avellar's character (multiple clones, caught between different expressions of a single character, fighting for his/her life in a political endgame, but one in which the Baron - albeit a villain - is almost peripheral) is arguably a viable/resonant template for Chauvelin (although I suspect we're meant to see Avellar as an analogue to Lioe - the game-changer).

Your comment on the patterns of behaviour between the powers/players and their pawns/lovers is interesting - I hadn't picked up the full extent of this on this reading, and I think for a future reading I will focus a lot more on Roscha and Cella. Cella is a well-known Gamer, and ran a recent scenario that was too overtly political (to try and get Ransome's attention; she intended/expected to get into trouble for it, which she did, but of course he was too wrapped up in his art to even hear about it much less care). But we never see her play, which is a shame. It's purely the news that some offworlder is using Harmsway et al in her new scenario that gets him down to Shadows - the possessive streak over his templates.

...but yes, it feels like Cella may have ended up on the cutting room floor. Which may be where she belonged, to be fair - ultimately, the Game world is a distraction here, however vibrant and however interesting an additional layer of detail and mirror-detail it provides. Deadlines, word counts and editorial sophistication may also come into play - there may have been a suggestion that readers would only tolerate so much roleplay?

(and I can see why you like this. It's great discussion material. If I were a fanfic person (I'm not), I could generate tonnage out of the wealth of rich ideas that it seeds, and leaves to grow wild. Bravo, Ms Scott)

>16 NorthernStar: I hope you enjoy it! I'd love to hear your thoughts if you'd care to share them too.

>17 imyril: Chauvelin! Huh. How interesting. I really never had thought about the Game characters as analogues of the cast but I'm definitely going to look at that when I reread. What you say makes a lot of sense.

I hadn't picked that repeated pattern up until this discussion either, I wonder how intentional it was. I feel like the other players we see at Shadows might have been intended to have a bigger pattern too, but I think the book is better for keeping the tight focus it does on the events we see. I think Scott talks about this book a bit in her writing book, Conceiving the Heavens- if I can find my copy I'll see if there's anything interesting in there about the writing process for this book.

I think it would be ripe for fanfic as well, but sadly I'm not a fanfic person either. I looked around out of curiosity but didn't see that anyone else had written anything either, though I found some for Scott's Point of Hopes and sequels and her Roads of Heaven trilogy.

As it is, this discussion has been a lot of fun. I've found Scott's other works to have the same pleasantly open-ended feel in varying quantities- perhaps I'll have to have another Scott group read in the future!

I think I too was surprised that Cella remained a relatively one-note character, when most of the others were more complex and well fleshed-out. I also expected to hear more about the fellow gamers at Shadows, especially as the casting of the original session seemed to be quite a big deal. I can't remember her name off the top of my head, but there was the woman who was a writer, I think, who was mentioned and piqued my interest - but we didn't see any more of her. So many avenues that could be explored in future stories/novels.

I've just added a copy of The jazz to Mount Tbr ...

Finally finished this earlier this week. I found it a bit hard to get into, so I read a bunch of other books first. Finally got down to it when I realized it was going to have to go back to the library soon and I couldn't renew. Once I got into it, I really enjoyed it, right up to the end, which seemed a bit abrupt and unfinished, and left me with doubts about the characters motivations. I'm glad I read it, though, and would consider reading other books by Scott.

>20 NorthernStar: Sorry I missed this before, @NorthernStar- thanks for stopping by with your comments! There's a bit of discussion about the ending upthread- I'm curious, how did you read the part where Ambidexter showed up in the Game scene after Ransome had died?

>21 sandstone78: - wasn't sure how to take it - someone else playing him? Maybe Lioe, since she inherited his effects.

I pronounce "Lioe" LIE-oh--no idea if that's how the author wanted it, but that's the way I like it best. Quinn LIE-oh; short and long.

sandstone78, thanks very much for introducing me to this author. There was another book of hers, Dreamships, in that sf haul I made recently (but am not sure how long it will take me to catalogue... swamped with a zillion things here before my holiday) and I shall be on the lookout for others. First of all, I'd like to get this one so I could read it again at leisure--I finally unearthed it on Monday (after spending the better part of Sunday shifting book-stalagmites around) and rushed through in two evenings so I could return it to my colleague today.

I'm afraid the Game sections suffered from the rush and that whatever the Game interactions revealed about the players was pretty much lost on me. (Concerning your question, I assumed it was Lioe, symbolically in Ransome's mantle AND sort of saying goodbye to him... a process that began with her taking over two of the characters he created.)

Like you and others, I really loved the setting (planet-sized Venice in Vietnam?) and was impressed off the bat by its easy detail. I loved the Graeco-Italo-Sino-Nipponic names and culture, complex etiquette, and the refinement hinted at in art; the hsaia (?), and that the society is an amalgam of species with various mediators involved. I would love to see more of that world and am dismayed that she (from what I gather from the talk here) hasn't revisited it.

(Speaking of names, "Chauvelin" fatally threw me to the character in The Scarlet Pimpernel, as played by Martin Shaw, though, so it wasn't even off that much visually... and Gelsomina the mask-maker is straight out of E.T.A. Hoffmann.)

Ten thumbs up for the absence of various isms. I do have a question, though--we saw how sex is regarded in this society, but what about love? What place does it have in a society where, as it seems, anyone can sleep with anyone else (assuming interest, of course), or, what does it even look like in such a society?

And--this could be the dumbest question yet--was Ransome's interest in Lioe erotic? My impression was that he was fascinated by her talent, intrigued, melancholy and disturbed over her ascendance in the gaming world, but not physically attracted to her. Otherwise, why didn't they sleep together? Or is the fact that they didn't supposed to prove precisely that they were attracted in some special way? Too significant for casualness or some such?

Lioe, at any rate, seems to know she's interested in him immediately, so I don't understand why they didn't get together when she was even staying with him.

I think something interesting could have been done with that (hey, fanfic!); I'd have gone for the "she likes him, but she's here to kill him" theme--fastest gun in the West, young lion supplants old etc.

I agree with above comments about female characters, but I think all could have done with more fleshing out. I can't say I took to any character particularly, but I'd be curious to follow Chauvelin in further adventures the most, because of the innate flexibility of a diplomat's situation and therefore potential for surprise. Lioe is impressive but a bit stiff to my taste--true blue, upright, you know how she'll act no matter what--look at how she gets concerned about not hurting Kesterel's feelings etc.

Jafiera is loads of fun, I'm sure, but a bit one-note... Cella I read as ambitious, and Damian's her means to power.

When it comes to intrigue, I must say that was my least favourite element, simply because it always reads as same old, same old. See one power grab, court intrigue, backstabbing conspiracies and the like, see 'em all.

Ummm... there's probably some other random stuff I could throw out but I'm wiped. I hope I get a chance to reread soon.

To sum up (for now)--excellent choice and a very welcome entry in my tentative (re)exploration of the genre I'm still not sure I could ever love again...

You're welcome, I'm glad you liked it! Sometimes it is all about getting the right books, I've not disliked anything I've picked up by Scott and it's disappointing to me that she's not better known- I'm hoping that she will get more attention though, I think her story in The Other Half of the Sky was printed in a year's best collection, and her backlist is slowly coming out in ebook.

(The Other Half of the Sky might interest you, for that matter, if you don't mind short fiction- it's a solid selection of space opera- defined very broadly- with female protagonists and a good selection of authors- Scott, Aliette de Bodard, Martha Wells, and Vandana Singh are authors I particularly like that are in it.)

I'm not sure, but I've never read there being an erotic attraction between Lioe and Ransome- I think there's a point where he's approaching her in Shadows and she initially wonders if he's approaching her for sex and then decides/realizes he's not, and I think Chauvelin thinks at one point too that Lioe isn't Ransome's type.

I've always read their relationship as intensely platonic, the two of them being strongly drawn together by their strong mutual interests and their talent in their fields- the feeling of finding someone who "gets it," per se, and to some extent also Ransome seeing her as a younger version of himself that he can stop from making the same mistakes, eg spending time in the Game instead of with original work.

(Of course, since Lioe is willing to change the Game to suit herself, I'm not sure that was ever really a limitation for her in the way it was for Ransome- but I think in some ways her interactions with him made her more set on doing that after all. Like she reflected later on, I think familiarity would have bred contempt between them, with Ransome too used to being seen as the best.)

I'm getting tempted to request Burning Bright fan fiction in what's it called, Yuletide I think, the fanfic request thing I always see around late in the year.

Love and marriage, as you mentioned, are curiously absent. I noticed that more on this reading than I had before. I did think that there was a definite affection, at least, on the part of Chauvelin and Ransome, with the way they are when they're together (and, later, when they're not), I could feel the weight of their shared history in their scenes together (just showing they share the same sense of humor, for example- the scene with Chrestil coming on the little faces in the paving stones of the garden still tickles me) but I think as I discussed before that their relationship couldn't ever really be equal, and I think both of them knew it- and I think that Lioe and Roscha's relationship is going to end up with the same dynamics, though I would definitely see Roscha working for Chrestil as a possible complication, and I imagine Lioe might underestimate Roscha to some degree- they don't have the built-in patron-artist dynamic to keep them in the same positions.

(Hmm, if I wrote fan fiction...)

Monogamy, in any case, doesn't seem a particular thing- though it's hard to tell what's general for society and what's particular to the planet Burning Bright and the specific circles we see, eg Gaming culture and the sphere of the wealthy.

Dreamships is interesting, Scott takes on a lot of interesting issues there. The way she uses computers works for me- she doesn't get bogged down in technical specifications or how things work so much as she thinks about how people use and relate to computers, which works much better for me as a programmer. I have an easier time accepting her variations since she doesn't seem as concerned with extrapolating how Computers Will Really Work In The Future.

There's a companion novel to Dreamships that you might want to keep an eye out for too, Dreaming Metal, but I haven't read it yet. (Note that Dreaming Metal along with a number of Scott's other later books seems to have only been released in trade paper and hardcover, not mass market- it took me a while to figure out that's why I could never find several of her books.)

Your feelings about not wanting to read intrigue are interesting- what kind of plots in the genre do you tend to like, ones more driven by the fantasy/science fiction concepts?

There's a moment (I think after she learns of Ransome's illness and impending death), when Lioe seems to be expressing the thought that "he's the one"... but what rotten luck etc.

Yes, I think what science fiction signifies to me generally is a thought experiment of sorts. Some central "hypothesis" getting "tested", in a way, by the story.

Thinking about your question, I realise I've enjoyed nothing so much recently, speaking of science fiction, as Christopher Priest's Inverted world. And I'm mildly annoyed that Stanislaw Lem is my favourite sf writer to date, although reading him nobody would guess, for instance, that women existed. But I just love that cleverness and imagination.