Customer Reviews

INTERFACE MASQUE

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Interface Masque details the adventures of Cecelie of Sept-Fortune; a computer security firm located in a future Venice. As an apprentice of Sept-Fortune, she must undergo a final test to become a full member of the firm. After the test, Cecelie's world is turned upside down. While the Septs are the de facto management of the Net, Cecelie soon discovers that the certain factions within the Sept structure are attempting to consolidate their power and not only control the Net in the de facto sense, but in the very real life sense as well.

Interface Masque presents an interest look at the possible future the modern-day Internet may take...but Ms. Lewitt attempts at composing three-dimensional characters, on the whole, was not a success. There is too much we did not know about the characters and their pasts, and Ms. Lewitt would introduce a character and then not explore that character further until too far down the line. But where Ms. Lewitt did compensate some was by building a reasonably believable world where those in charge use music to control the masses and information is controlled by an elite few (i.e. the Septs).

Interface Masque was an okay book. Would I recommend this book to a friend? Probably not. But if the mood were to strike me, I would probably give Ms. Lewitt's works another chance.

Very briefly, INTERFACE MASQUE is one of those novels whose underlying assumptions are so well constructed that it draws you into its world completely. Read it. I assure you that you will never again hear cyberspace described as "the Information Superhighway" without thinking that Lewin's "Infosea" is a much, much better metaphor.

talk about imagination! lewitt's metaphors and intriguing ideas of a futuristic world come together in a fantastic knot of science fiction and fantasy. be drawn in to a world of masked faces and surprising revelations.

The potential is there, but it is never fulfilled. The initial premise is interesting, the alien ghost in the machine that could have been mindblowing is far too simplistically treated and makes no real impact on the plot. The plot discontinuities and lack of coherence become jarring after a while. The characters always felt shallow, particularly outside the two main protagonists. However, the metaphors and attempt to link the historical Venetian city state and the virtual reality future rescue the book from complete disaster.

Beautiful imagery in the imagined world of future Venice, parallelled with the online world created by master artisans. Everyone has a masque, or an avatar, that portrays them in the digital world. What happens when power struggles between the creators, an unknown digital presence, and a brilliant student of the digital arts?

_____Thirty-eight cents is the going rate for this crackhead of a novel. Golly, why could that be? Could it be because the writing style is so steeped in techno-babble that it barely makes any sense at all? Or maybe, just possibly, the plot is so jumpy and nonsensical that not even a megadose of Ritalin (tm) could save it? A third reason for this book being so bad, maybe it would be because it is so unoriginal and so much a NEUROMANCER rip-off that it even includes a last-minute reference to space aliens? I swear to Shatner, the inclusion of beings "from another solar system" is just stupid beyond dumb; the alien plot development has almost no place in INTERFACE MASQUE. In fact, it seems as if this whole book dies not belong on any library or bookstore shelf. Is it worth $[...] U.S.? Heck no, you're better off saving that money for candy or car fuel.
_____Let me start with one of the above-mentioned issues: the writing style, the forked-up crackhead language that passes for a writing style in this book. INTERFACE MASQUE throws the reader head-first into a psychedelically distorted cyber-steeped world, a world in which a spoiled bratty female hacker-programmer-opera singer accesses the Infosea with a dreambox--by the order of a Signora for the sake of the Sept-Fortuna families... What the fork? Well, it only gets worse from there, folks! Descriptions of settings and characters are so vague and abstract that the writer primarily just makes to with character names most of the time. Such is problematic: So many characters talk in such similar ways and are so generically blah that they all may as well be clones or something. Lacking in explanations, abstract and careless with details, full of techno-jargon, is this problematic? Does a mermaid know how to swim?
_____So many randomly unnecessary foreign words and classical music terms are thrown in wherever and anywhere (palazzo, pieta, parc, signora). So the foreign words in INTERFACE MASQUE do not have English equivalents and must be used, is that what the writer is saying? Or is it that the author is just showing off when using so much foreign terminology? It is as if Lewitt is saying, Ha-ha, I know some Italian words and opera terms and you don't! I can understand that the main setting of the book is in Italy, and the characters are primarily talking in Italian. No excuse, I give the writing style no excuse for being pedantic rather than telling us a story.
_____This is bad. It is not bad in the '80s sense of the word: so bad that it's good. I mean, the writing style is bad according to even the most basic texts on English language and composition: a book that breaks breaking basic composition rules regarding jargon and foreign terms. See this, what's in my left hand? This is a copy of Diana Hacker's A POCKET STYLE MANUAL: Third Edition. Come, brothers and sisters, let us partake of the wisdom that Hacker has to dispense upon us. Jargon, on page 16 of A POCKET STYLE MANUAL, is "puffed-up language designed more to impress readers than to inform them." Did Lewitt use "puffed-up" language? Oh yes she did! As for usage of foreign words, it is a basic requirement of English composition that one "[i]talicize or underline foreign words used in an English sentence" (Hacker, p87). Did Lewitt italicize the Italian words? Nope, Lewitt did not. To think, a professional writer from a professional publishing house let this typo-riddled, puffed-up crap of a book get published--errors and all? What a load!
_____Moreover, the plot...uh...may not necessarily be a decent plot at all. Or make that plots. It is just that the book's plots are so unfocused and randomly rampant that a person would wonder if there was one to begin with. It begins as a book with the main protagonist being an up-and-coming elite hacker...who comes into contact with an anti-corporate rebel and becomes an outcast... No, it's a book about an Italian oligarchy banning, censoring and restricting all forms of music save the cannon of classical drivel composed hundreds of years ago during the Enlightenment... No, wait, just about halfway through--page 167--it turns into a book about aliens invading the Internet! The plot is that of plots, meaning that this book is unfocused.
_____What exactly is this book about? A David Lynch movie makes more sense than this example of attention deficit disorder in literary form. We go from jazz musicians and opera singers to computer hackers. Then we go into terrorism... Some aliens get thrown in at several points, too--at least the presence of the aliens. If a high-schooler or college student wrote this, it would definitely be an argument in favor of pharmaceutical intervention. If Lewitt wanted to write a book about terrorism, why didn't she do that? If she wanted to write a book about terrorism, she should have done that next. Throw in a third book about aliens later. This book is multiple disjointed plots and themes jammed into one novel, leaving no room for a good story.
_____If a person is going to write a book that resembles attention deficit disorder, the least that the person can do is try to be ORIGINAL about it? Why is it that most every author of the 1990s sees fit to rip off of most every OTHER author from that decade? I have read William Gibson's nonsensical book NEUROMANCER--which is a rotten book according to everyone. That is, everyone save an inbred cadre of literary critics who have yet to see the real world outside the ivy-covered walls of academia. Anyone can virtually see the clone-work connections between INTERFACE MASQUE and Gibson's over-hyped book. Both INTERFACE MASQUE and NEUROMANCER use overdoses of techno-babble to describe plots about hackers delving into virtual worlds. Both novels also follow the Ayn Rand-esque fantasy of ultra-skilled individual professionals--in this case, cyber-professionals--being smarter and better than everyone else in terms of dealing with the threat-at-hand. Above all else, both novels have some damned aliens invading the Internet for no good reason other than to just be weird. In short, this book reads like a Europhile-inspired rip-off of Gibson's work. Why didn't Lewitt just retitle her work NEUROMANCER II: The Opera Singer Version and be done with it?
_____You know what? I'm done with this book and am taking it back to the library tomorrow--not soon enough. I would like to invite over my brother and let him videotape me splashing this novel with in gasoline before burning it. That would make a too-awesome YouTube video. Yes, then I would have to pay for the book. The alternative would be me buying a copy of it for the price of a gumball and having some pyromaniac giggles that way. But gasoline is expensive. So are gumballs. This book is not worth the pocket-change price you would pay for it by ordering it from Amazon.com. Go buy some gas and gumballs, and be happy.
_____On another note, why is it that the post-1990s sci-fi publishing industry publishes SO MUCH CRAP? Most every science fiction novel I have read from that decade turned out to be a real stinker. Stupid writing styles, nonsensical and unoriginal plot construction that pretty much describes almost everything written by almost every science fiction writer since the year 1990. My goodness, has crack-cocaine become the new fad among people in the genre? Only crackheads could write most of the crap that seems to get into publishers' printers these days. And maybe, perhaps given enough dopamine tweakers, maybe only crackheads could appreciate it.


Bibliography

Lewitt, Shariann. INTERFACE MASQUE. New York: Tor, 1997.

Hacker, Diane. A POCKET STYLE MANUAL (Third Edition). Bedford: St. Martin's, 2000.

"NIDA InfoFacts: Methylphenidate (Ritalin)." NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON DRUG ABUSE. 19 Aug 2007.
<http://www.nida.nih.gov/Infofacts/Ritalin.html.>