March Madness (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781494225513)

I think we may be inventing a new science fiction sub-genre here, pretty much the opposite of military SF. Call it, hmm... Cyberpixie. Cyberpixie is not like the oldest of science fiction, because there are real, human (or at least people) stories here. The technology is allowed to make grabs for the story-line, but the characters always take the plot back and run away with it. And while weird things that properly belong in explicit fantasy universes are allowed, they must be logical and self-consistent, and they don't get to hog center-stage either. Instead, Cyberpixie is stories about (mostly) realistic people living in a complicated world. Nobody's problems or responses to what happens to them are inherently too trivial to mention. There's no need to ruthlessly prune away all the minor characters and sub-plots in pursuit of a grand tale. In Cyberpixie, that's actually counter-productive, because the story is fundamentally about people, rather than things or grand quests. The only other place I've ever seen anything like Cyberpixie before is in the anthologies where multiple authors help flesh out a shared universe. (For example, Eric Flint's 1632 series, and Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar anthologies.) In such cases, the extra authors usually feel a need to avoid trampling on the original author's evolving storyline(s). So, they select minor characters or people not even mentioned in the original books that would logically belong there anyway, and tell their perspectives on canonical events. Or they make up events for their stories that are so trivial that the primary author's heroes can simply ignore them when that author gets around to issuing another installment. This trend sometimes vexes authors that think stories should be big, grand themes, but it tends to sell VERY well, even when book-shoppers know EXACTLY what they are buying. And especially when subscribers know what it is that they are buying! Evanie Cronquist