Fiorinda, Frederica

I finished Midnight Lamp last night. It's the third book in Gwyneth Jones' rockstars-ruling-England trilogy, and is currently only available in the UK, or at least to those with access to amazon.co.uk. Midnight Lamp was somewhat anticlimactic: it suffered from the fact that the grand villain was killed and his severed head displayed à la Barrayar at the end of Book II. It also suffered because I've been reading A.S. Byatt's series about Frederica Potter and her family. Frederica and the rockstar heroine Fiorinda Slater are strangely similar: both are English, brilliant, red-haired, skinny, bad at female friendships, prone to passionately unwise romances, and educated in a liberal intellectual tradition that is useless faced with societal upheaval. And of course their names match. But Byatt's Still Life resonated with me at a dangerous level; not only is it aggressively well-written, it's a story about being at Cambridge in a time when the sex ratio was something like eleven to one male-female (not unfamiliar to the science students of today), and about being hopelessly literary, and about leaving university for a different world and sex with men who don't make sense in the university's terms, and how that half works and half fails utterly. And then the character I identified most with (not Frederica, who reminds me more of someone I would try to be friends with) died unexpectedly, by an act of God in the form of an ungrounded wire, and I was pretty much overcome for the rest of Still Life and the beginning of Babbletower, until life managed to move on fictionally, the way life eventually must. (Babbletower is intentionally disturbing but less dangerous to me personally, in part because the disturbing bits kept sounding too much like Byatt or Byatt's Christabel LaMotte imitating Sade, rather than like their putative author, the fictional Jude Mason.)

Midnight Lamp, despite a plot revolving around the potential destruction of the world rather than a death and a divorce trial, couldn't compete in intensity. It had its moments, though; in particular, the scene in which two men raid a California-separatist ghost town taken over by terrorists, using assault rifles and robot phantoms adapted from rock-concert lightshows, was classic, as was the emotionally vulnerable minor-AI Toyota Rugrat.