Spirits in the Wires

[mneme]

Some fun stuff here, but I did find that it needed much more editing than it seems to have gotten.
Aside from the obvious technical issues and oddness (an obvious problem when you have a non-techie writer writing about technically inclined characters, but he should have had someone with a clue heavily edit the technese sections just so they read right, rather than getting a concept and wordlist (or whatever) from someone techish and then going off on his own without an apparent safety net), the plot seems to have some discontinuity issues, and other things that are never, or badly, explained.
For staters...it's clear that Saskia was created by Leviathan. But it's not at all clear who created Suzi (who seems to date from after Librarius broke loose), nor why Lib wants revenge on Aaron and Jackson in the first place -- it fits with his cover story (which one?), but going to that much effort for the cover doesn't feel right.
Basically, Lib seems to have been invented to make sure the Wordwood would not have gone bad after all, but his inclusion doesn't seem to make that much sense, and the shifting stories doesn't help all that much.
In general, De Lint does do a good job keeping up with a complicated plot where everyone's actions seem to end up being someone else's problem, but he does seem to lose track of things occasionaly, and his inability to believably write about tech in a tech book hurts him a lot.

Comments

[drawingon.livejournal.com]

muchly agreed.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I think we have 3 personae here.

Leviathan, who probably created Saskia.
Librarius, who did not create anyone we met.
Wordwood itself -- or perhaps a different part of Leviathan -- but in any case, something other than Librarius. This something is what created Suzi and the others, and confronts Suzi, and wants to punish Aaran and Jackson.

I like the last 2 pages explanation, not because Wordwood wouldn't have gone bad, but because it just didn't make sense to me that this site would never have encountered a virus before, and Jackson wasn't trying anything big.

As for going bad, well, the problem I do have is that we're to kind of not worry about Aaran's fears of breaking in a few years, even though the last time -- Librarius -- the entire world could have been destroyed. Forget Christiana feeling guilty because she could be where Aaran is and Suzi poo-pooing that. They should be somewhat concerned about making sure that the world doesn't end, y'know?