Subject: Review: Virtual Girl by Amy Thompson

From: [email-masked] (Andrew Hamlin, co Squish)
Date: 19 Sep 93 21:37:16 GMT

by Andrew Hamlin

Virtual Girl

a novel by Amy Thomson 

New York: Ace Books, 1993 (248 pgs)

    When I met Amy Thomson, author of this novel about a middle-aged nerd
who synthesizes a beautiful woman and loses control of her, I asked if she'd
ever seen _Weird Science_, a film about two young nerds who synthesize a
beautiful woman and lose control of her.  No, she said, a friend of hers was
going to show her that movie now that she'd finished the book, but she
worked from the story of Pygmalion -- "with a twist".

    Reading _Virtual Girl_ showed me how inaccurate the _Weird Science_
comparison was.  Although they sprang from that Pygmalion myth, the film
sells itself with sex as the youth pictures of the 1980s did, uninterested
in the nuance of sex sensation or the subtext of sex as power (something
_Risky Business_, the best of those films, held up for inspection with
zeal-- not preparing to eat the meat, but admiring how the grease shone in
the light)._Virtual Girl_'s protagonist Maggie watches a man having sex with
her and "began to understand why humans feared and desired sex so much.. She
felt more than a little sorry for humans.  If this was the closest they
could get to each other, they must be very lonely indeed."

    Thomson refuses to write erotica, and her Maggie never enjoys
intercourse.  Her liaison with Marie/Murray, a transvestite who's temporarily
shed female garb, creates intimacy through acceptance.  Marie/Murray casts
aside his dress and makeup, Maggie the pretense that she's human; the former
remarks that "You didn't expect anything, I could be who I wanted to be."
Is she, then, a plastic sex doll with built-in barometers?  How much
person-to-person sex is sophisticated masterbation?  Can "intimacy" be
anything but an empty nod to a collective notion?

    Maggie finds a truer intimacy in the meeting of minds, and although she
cannot meet a human's wind as she meets with other artificial intelligences,
she takes the same approach; she plunges into sharing with a commitment
putting that saccharin snakebeast Barney to shame.  We inhabit a postmodern
culture where "deep" and "intense" exist only in quotes, exist only to blow
up in the mouths of Beavis and Butt-head, or Wayne and Garth, or for that
matter Emilio Estivez and Harry Dean Stanton in _Repo Man_, a seamless weave
of cool trash that needs an alien invasion to puncture itself.  _Virtual
Girl_ stays earthbound.  Maggie isn't afraid to be that close, and a few
humans can meet her halfway.

    Pat Cadigan, in what's probably her best work, spoke of the "lunatic
bridge", where two minds each send half of their substance down that bridge,
for a meeting in the middle. Cadigan wrote about the disease of too much
intimacy; Thomson stabs at the opposite affliction, and the simple
assertion that this bridge even exists, can be trod, carries a pleasantly
surprising weight.  _Virtual Girl_ has some awkwardness in it, some
exposition that is really sermonizing, but in a genre (cyberpunk, yes, I'll
say the word) where cool wetware spins like the insane pipers around H.P.
Lovecraft's Azathoth, Amy Thomson unfashionably but sagely suggests the
presence of sun and moon and stars.  Of angels.

        %A Thompson, Amy
        %T Virtual Girl
        %I ACE Science Fiction
        %C New York
        %D August 1993
        %G ISBN 0-441-86500-3
        %P 248 pp.
        %O paperback, US$4.99

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      comments can reach Andy Hamlin through [email-masked].
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