Trouble and Her Friends
What a remarkably good work! How come I didn't hear about this when it came out in came out in 1994? Queer cyberpunk and very well written.
First, the cyberpunk. It's high cyberpunk, full of a functioning underworld economy and lots of descriptions of virtual worlds and hacking through dramatic, exciting scenes of cracking ICE and looking cool. A good chunk of the action is written in cyberspace and it seems a little cheesy but it's so visual and attention grabbing, good fun. It feels sort of retro reading this now, the imagined cyberpunk future has not come to pass. But I like it.
Second, the queer. It's not the central part of this book but queerness is essential to the characters and the plot. The main group of people are all queer hacker friends, bonded together by their dual outsider status as queer and as hackers. Very chosen family and the queerness serves as a shortcut to intimacy with and between the characters. Also there's some hot woman/woman sex in the book that's well written and fun. Having women POV characters solves a lot of the male gaze problems that suffuse Gibson, etc.
A friend complains that not much actually happens in the book. It is a lot of pages for a pretty simple story. I didn't mind. At one point the main character spends four pages just checking in to a flophouse. The author writes a lot of details about currencies, and identification, and how door locks work, and... she did a lot of world building and was eager to show it. Makes for a slow book but fun reading. I've been reading a lot of this thinking about the Cyberpunk 2077 game where that kind of detail becomes essential to the game design.
The story itself is fairly simple. A lot of it is a "get the old gang back together" heist story. Then there's a sort of not-well-structured mystery about who the bad guy is. But then it takes a really interesting turn. The bad guy turns out to be Silk, a teenager. His story is unsettling and very queer. Slightly puzzling, I think it would have been more true to write explicitly that the Mayor was having a sexual relationship with him but then that opens a big can of worms for the book. Anyway this is the human complexity I was looking for and it was from an unexpected quarter. In particular turning the Mysterious Bad Guy into a victim himself, or at least relatively powerless. There's also a moment in the end where Trouble and Cerise both recognize Silk as one of their own, both on the wire and queer. And they sort of want to protect him even as they work to get him arrested. I liked that.
While there's not a lot of plot for such a long book, there's exactly enough plot for a movie script. This book would make a great movie. Particularly if they added more to the script for the bad guy. Good characters, a richly realized world that would translate into a beautiful production.. Maybe cyberpunk is too retro right now, or alternately it'd feel like a sort of bad Matrix clone. But I wonder if anyone has ever considered seriously producing it.