Lightborn
Tricia Sullivan
438 pages
published in 2010
Late last year Tricia Sullivan decried the fact that of the ten Clarke Award winners in the last decade, only one had been a woman, which in turned triggered a long discussion about women in sf in general much of it indexed at Torque Control. For me personally this discussion triggered a resolve to read more sf and fantasy written by women, as they had been woefully underrepresented until then. It was through the same discussions I learned about Tricia Sullivan herself, who as a writer had been completely unknown to me until then. Not only did she trigger the debate, her novel Maul ended second in the top ten Future Classics poll that Torque Control ran. So I kept an eye out for it at the local library, but they didn’t have it.
What they had instead was Lightborn, her latest novel. It’s a classic coming of age story, set in the city of Los Sombres in a somewhat alternate America, where instead of computers they have Feynmans and people use a special sort of light, Shine to program their own brains, as well as communicate with their version of the ‘net, the field, which is also inhabitated by the lightborn of the title, artificial intelligences, both benign and rogue. There are safeguards build/created in the field to keep the lightborn tame and Shine under control, but of course these fail at the start of the novel –otherwise there’d be no story after all. It leaves almost all the adults in Los Sombres permanently Shined and useless and kids like Roksana and Xavier, our heroes, scrabbling to survive in the aftermath.