primeideal: Lan and Moiraine from "Wheel of Time" TV (moiraine damodred)
[personal profile] primeideal
This was a rec that was a creative twist on the "High Fashion" bingo square, which I was grateful for because I didn't expect to run across much for that in the wild. It's set in 2002; Cayce Pollard is a freelance fashion consultant/marketer. She has an innate sense for judging "cool" versus "uncool" logos/aesthetics, and can give companies feedback accordingly. The flip side of this ability is that she's "allergic" to lots of trademarks and logos, and so she can really only function in extremely generic monochrome clothing with no identifying labels.
 
The national symbols of her homeland don't trigger her, or so far haven't. And over the past year, in New York, she's been deeply grateful for this. An allergy to flags or eagles would have reduced her to shut-in status: a species of semiotic agoraphobia.
 
Her hobby is participating in a web forum discussing/obsessing over a series of mysterious video clips that have been emerging in the pre-Youtube era without identifying information. Are they clips from a finished project that the auteur is deliberately releasing in a seemingly random order? Is it a work in progress? It's a mystery.
 
Cayce gets hired by an exorbitantly rich firm to consult on their branding, then to track down the creator of the footage. So she basically has all the resources she could want, but has to cut deals with shady characters from the corporate world and the internet, and also she might be being stalked by bad guys.
 
I didn't feel like we really got into Cayce's head much, and so it was hard to get invested in her or anybody else. The writing style is often fragmentary and distant.
 
Cayce feels herself make a decision, though she couldn't say what exactly it is, pulls out the chair at the end of the table, and sits, but without putting her legs under the table.
*
And managing to speak, wakes, awash with grief and terror and some sense of a decision made, though she knows not what, nor yet by whom, nor if indeed she ever will.
*
And that in the address window, as though she would actually send it.
Touchpadding down menu to Send.
And of course she doesn't.
And watch it as it sends.
 
After reading "The Difference Engine," maybe I was cynical about women being objectified. Here, Cayce and her forum friends work on catfishing a nerdy Japanese guy with digitally-manipulated photos of a sexy lady. She's sort of revulsed by this, but not revulsed enough not to do it; it feels like a kind of "have your cake and eat it too" attempt at the narrative. Similarly for "eh I don't know how I feel about working for big business but I might as well spend all their money."
 
A lot of it is kind of thriller-y; the speculative aspects are slight, mostly Cayce's weird abilities/sensitivies. There's also a plotline about steganography. It is true that you can use technology to hide secret data messages in (say) image files, or watermarking to prove "this was authenticated by the same source." But to the best of my knowledge, you can't use this kind of embedded data to track the spread of a file around the world. So maybe that was just SFnal artistic license, but when it happens to overlap with something I sort of understand, it's like...I can't tell if most readers are supposeed to understand this as taking creative liberties or not. (Similarly, retired NSA cryptographers should not be calling in favors with their friends who are still active to trace e-mails. [Even if you pay them in black-market pocket calculators.] But this is the post-9/11 security state, so no one's at their best.) I guess the idea of a functional reverse image search was science fiction in 2003.
 
I like the aspect of "obsessive web forum friends coming through for each other and being just as cool in person as they are online." But beyond that, this one didn't really do it for me.

Bingo: High Fashion, like I said.

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