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Jazz
Melissa Scott, twice winner of the Lambda Award for best SF novel, and author of the cyberpunk classic, Trouble and Her Friends, returns with a hip novel of the media dominated future. Tin Lizzy, a young woman techie with a criminal past, and Keyz, a teenage boy who used his parents access codes to borrow a Hollywood studio's editing program (that is the hidden source of its media success), are on the run from the studio police and the vengeance of a megalomaniac CEO across the altered landscape of mid-21st century USA. The jazz is the new artform of the internet in the new century, the art of spreading convincing entertaining lies. The Jazz is a triumph.
108 pages, Unbound
First published June 3, 2000
1 person is currently reading
156 people want to read
About the author
Melissa Scott
100 books449 followersScott studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, and earned her PhD. in comparative history. She published her first novel in 1984, and has since written some two dozen science fiction and fantasy works, including three co-authored with her partner, Lisa A. Barnett.
Scott's work is known for the elaborate and well-constructed settings. While many of her protagonists are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, this is perfectly integrated into the rest of the story and is rarely a major focus of the story. Shadow Man, alone among Scott's works, focuses explicitly on issues of sexuality and gender.
She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction in 1986, and has won several Lambda Literary Awards.
In addition to writing, Scott also teaches writing, offering classes via her website and publishing a writing guide.
Scott lived with her partner, author Lisa A. Barnett, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire for 27 years, until the latter's death of breast cancer on May 2, 2006.
Scott's work is known for the elaborate and well-constructed settings. While many of her protagonists are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, this is perfectly integrated into the rest of the story and is rarely a major focus of the story. Shadow Man, alone among Scott's works, focuses explicitly on issues of sexuality and gender.
She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction in 1986, and has won several Lambda Literary Awards.
In addition to writing, Scott also teaches writing, offering classes via her website and publishing a writing guide.
Scott lived with her partner, author Lisa A. Barnett, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire for 27 years, until the latter's death of breast cancer on May 2, 2006.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
August 14, 2007
A decent idea--the Baudrillard-esque media landscape of the future erases the distinction between Truth and Lies, leaving only the play of information called Jazz. Unfortunately, it's poorly developed and buried in a knock-off of William Gibson circa 1984. The writing is competent enough, but this book is (c) 2000; after 16 years, I have much higher expectations for new Cyberpunk.
April 17, 2018
Characters I couldn't care about, psuedo-tech that might have been a good idea but weren't fleshed out nearly enough, slow moving plot--I found I was forcing myself to keep plowing through this, so I stopped.
July 12, 2017
A-/B+, clever & well-written, but too facile.
March 14, 2021
I have seen reviews of this novel, disparaging it as a William Gibson knock-off, that we should expect more from a book written 16 years or so after Neuromancer and other negatives. They couldn't be more wrong. Yes, there is lingo and buzz-words and company name-dropping and cyberspace and all that, but Scott gives us a lot more for her protagonist Tin Lizzy than Gibson gave us for his cowboy Case: Lizzy has a past that we find details for over the course of the novel, one that informs the narrative; using company names is a sci-fi trope that precedes Gibson (see Heinlein's mention of the company 'Rolls-Skoda' as the manufacturer of a limousine in the book "I Will Fear No Evil") that attempts to give a real-time legitimacy to the setting of the story.
All in all this novel has better story-telling, and a much more sympathetic character in Tin Lizzy than Gibson's male characters, even though her vocation of spreading "Jazz" on the worldwide web resembles our current issue with curated Truth in media. I am going to go and buy me a copy now, as I checked this out at the library, and wish to have my own copy to put alongside Neuromancer and Metrophage.
All in all this novel has better story-telling, and a much more sympathetic character in Tin Lizzy than Gibson's male characters, even though her vocation of spreading "Jazz" on the worldwide web resembles our current issue with curated Truth in media. I am going to go and buy me a copy now, as I checked this out at the library, and wish to have my own copy to put alongside Neuromancer and Metrophage.
April 24, 2020
Late cyberpunk example that tried incorporating the (emerging at the time) actual internet, with some (occasionally) amusing results, such as the sentence "Meet me at ChildWorld.org". The word "jazz" here translates to "internet bullshit" or "bullshit in general." However, they only ever use the word as a noun, never any other part of speech. No one says "You jazzing me?" or "What the jazzing hell are you talking about?" which is a missed opportunity. On the whole, however, it's pretty entertaining.
August 20, 2012
When 16-year old Seth Halford (a.k.a. "Keyz"), the son of RCD Studio employees uses his parents' access to hack the Studio's system and downloads a proprietary program used to determine which movies will be hits vs. flops, he quickly applies it to his own would-be efforts at perfecting content for the online mix of misinformation, gossip and spin known as "jazz." Previously unsuccessful in selling his amateurish efforts, with the help of a language parsing program known as Orpha-Toto, Keyz tweaks his content and successfully brokers his first sale to no less an online presence than the wellknown site Testify. In seemingly the space of hours, RCD discovers the theft and promptly links it back to the Halfords. With nowhere else to turn, a panicked Keyz appeals to Tin Lizzy, the web-based artist charged with finalizing the backtech for his web content. The ensuing cross-country road chase is enjoyable, but feels a bit dated given that The Jazz was published in 2000 and not the heady early 1980s era of cyberpunk. Just to be clear, it's the language used (e.g., Net vs. Internet or web), the tools (e.g., goggles, headsets, and gloves a la Johnny Mnemonic) that feels dated and not that cyberpunk is any less enjoyable in the 21st century than it was in the late 20th.
As a bit of an aside, the thing that most captivated me about the worlds created in Melissa Scott's The Jazz were the "covenanted communities" such as Americana (just outside the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area) and the medieval hafeners community (in the midwest) where Keyz, Lizzy et al. find sanctuary while on the run. On the one hand, the description of Americana called to mind something of the New Urbanist philosophy--admittedly taken to an extreme. (Think American Girl meets the Kentlands as a way of life--loads of nostalgia for a time that never actually was, while trying to distance itself from the seedier elements of modernity.) Readers only got a quick glimpse at the residents of Americana, whereas we followed the action for a more extended period of time among the hafeners. The scenes where Lizzy, Keyz and their posse disguise themselves as would-be Vikings and accompany Silent William and the hafener "extras" to the filming of Yorvick: The Settlement (ironically, a reality show produced by RCD studios) as a means for clandestinely gaining access to the reclusive Njiri Shida on Isle Rialto, the non-extradition luxury resort situated on a former offshore drilling platform just off Gulfport were positively brilliant! (Shida, a legend in the online community, would potentially either be able to use his considerable pull to force the Studio to cut a deal or, if push came to shove, purchase the program and make it available to RCD's competitors, thereby bringing about Garrety's downfall.)
Also well conceived was the juxtapositioning of the attitudes of insiders vs. outsiders of the covenanted communities. In one scene, RCD security chief Hallac muses about what might compel a disaffected former military member to seek refuge in this futuristic version of an intentional community:
Nope, not really--esp. when compared with the versions of reality represented by the Los Angeles studio-sponsored company town in which the Halfords reside or the optionless landscape of the District from which Lizzy had against considerable odds escaped to some measure of respectability and self-reliance in Crystal City Underground.
Another fun aspect of the story, is the linguistic component. Admittedly, it's little dribs and drabs including deep structure, natural language, and a number of Chomsky-inspired linguistic concepts. While only modestly developed, these made for an amusing commentary given that one of Orpha-Toto's flaws was that it could only identify a successful formula based on prior movie formulae vs. being able to generate new plots and sequences. (Kind of makes you wonder given the untold number of remakes Hollywood is churning out these days, no?)
The one thing that most suprised me about The Jazz was its utter failure to ever have its otherwise introspective and intelligent characters compare the monomaniacal twisting of reality engaged in by studio president Gardener Garrety--the true villain of the piece--and the shaping/distorting of reality engaged in by writers, artists and internet sites and places such as Testify and its competitors. This lack of self-reflection seemed sorely missing in what was otherwise some decent world- and character building. Plus, in this reader's estimation the whole point seemed to be that the mainstream world--with its obsession with the sensationalist, the dubious, and questionable in the form of jazz, reality TV, endlessly rehashed movie plots--is virtually indistinguishable from the selective realities of the covenanted communities. Despite having demonstrated this point, I really wanted the story's characters to have explicitly articulated this point. In my estimation, that would have been the basis for a four- or higher star rating.
As a bit of an aside, the thing that most captivated me about the worlds created in Melissa Scott's The Jazz were the "covenanted communities" such as Americana (just outside the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area) and the medieval hafeners community (in the midwest) where Keyz, Lizzy et al. find sanctuary while on the run. On the one hand, the description of Americana called to mind something of the New Urbanist philosophy--admittedly taken to an extreme. (Think American Girl meets the Kentlands as a way of life--loads of nostalgia for a time that never actually was, while trying to distance itself from the seedier elements of modernity.) Readers only got a quick glimpse at the residents of Americana, whereas we followed the action for a more extended period of time among the hafeners. The scenes where Lizzy, Keyz and their posse disguise themselves as would-be Vikings and accompany Silent William and the hafener "extras" to the filming of Yorvick: The Settlement (ironically, a reality show produced by RCD studios) as a means for clandestinely gaining access to the reclusive Njiri Shida on Isle Rialto, the non-extradition luxury resort situated on a former offshore drilling platform just off Gulfport were positively brilliant! (Shida, a legend in the online community, would potentially either be able to use his considerable pull to force the Studio to cut a deal or, if push came to shove, purchase the program and make it available to RCD's competitors, thereby bringing about Garrety's downfall.)
Also well conceived was the juxtapositioning of the attitudes of insiders vs. outsiders of the covenanted communities. In one scene, RCD security chief Hallac muses about what might compel a disaffected former military member to seek refuge in this futuristic version of an intentional community:
"Silent William," Hallac said. "Born Harris Batchelder. Ten years a Navy SEAL, too, with half a dozen police actions. European and Asian, to his credit: you had to wonder what made a guy like that retreat into the nonreality of a covenanted community" (p. 249).
Nope, not really--esp. when compared with the versions of reality represented by the Los Angeles studio-sponsored company town in which the Halfords reside or the optionless landscape of the District from which Lizzy had against considerable odds escaped to some measure of respectability and self-reliance in Crystal City Underground.
Another fun aspect of the story, is the linguistic component. Admittedly, it's little dribs and drabs including deep structure, natural language, and a number of Chomsky-inspired linguistic concepts. While only modestly developed, these made for an amusing commentary given that one of Orpha-Toto's flaws was that it could only identify a successful formula based on prior movie formulae vs. being able to generate new plots and sequences. (Kind of makes you wonder given the untold number of remakes Hollywood is churning out these days, no?)
The one thing that most suprised me about The Jazz was its utter failure to ever have its otherwise introspective and intelligent characters compare the monomaniacal twisting of reality engaged in by studio president Gardener Garrety--the true villain of the piece--and the shaping/distorting of reality engaged in by writers, artists and internet sites and places such as Testify and its competitors. This lack of self-reflection seemed sorely missing in what was otherwise some decent world- and character building. Plus, in this reader's estimation the whole point seemed to be that the mainstream world--with its obsession with the sensationalist, the dubious, and questionable in the form of jazz, reality TV, endlessly rehashed movie plots--is virtually indistinguishable from the selective realities of the covenanted communities. Despite having demonstrated this point, I really wanted the story's characters to have explicitly articulated this point. In my estimation, that would have been the basis for a four- or higher star rating.
Read
December 13, 2019I read this one in later high school. Saw it on the SFF shelf at the local library and was interested in Jazz music so I checked it out.
Some of the concepts would feel extremely outdated today in our world of wireless networking and internet, but I remember it fondly as also exploring the influence media can have on reality.
Some of the concepts would feel extremely outdated today in our world of wireless networking and internet, but I remember it fondly as also exploring the influence media can have on reality.
December 11, 2019
I was afraid that this twenty-year-old cyberthriller would seem dated, but surprisingly, it wasn't. A bit thinner on characterization than most of Scott's cyberwork, but still held my interest throughout.
April 18, 2020
Premiere design programmer Tin Lizzy, a reformed criminal, flees underground to protect a brilliant teenage hacker from a vindictive entertainment CEO's vengeance in an odyssey across 21st century America.
January 2, 2024
I love how the cyberpunk genre is reimagined here with alt-universe slang and 90's VR-style dystopian entertainment megacorporation information analytics. I had to double-check the publication date because it still feels so relevant to the 2020s.
October 5, 2017
The story is imaginative enough. The plot is straightforward.
January 25, 2022
Loved this!
Read
May 15, 2023Smokey
September 24, 2023
The most prescient work of science fiction ever written.
November 28, 2018
I'd read Scott's cyberpunk classic "Trouble and Her Friends" several years ago and had always meant to read more by Scott, who is known for including queer characters in her books.
"The Jazz" is set in a world where disinformation and misinformation runs rampant on the web and in real life, and people make an art form out of it. Entertainment studios are hugely powerful and have their own police forces. The story begins with Keyz, a kid who aspires to "make jazz" but hacks a studio's proprietary program to help him write it. He gets in trouble and reaches out to Tin Lizzy, a former criminal who has gone straight and creates background scenarios for other people's jazz. They go on the run from the studio's detective and try to find help as they travel across a near-future America.
One minor dislike in this book is that, while Tin Lizzy is developed as a character, many others aren't well-developed, particularly Keyz. You get a little background on him early, but then he's just a generic, sulky teenager for most of the rest of the book.
One thing I LOVED is that people in power are constantly dismissing women, the working class, the old and the disabled as being unable to fight back or accomplish anything, and the novel is FULL of queer women, older women, and working class folks who are outwitting those in power and helping other poor and oppressed people to get a leg up. Loved it. Will read more by Scott.
"The Jazz" is set in a world where disinformation and misinformation runs rampant on the web and in real life, and people make an art form out of it. Entertainment studios are hugely powerful and have their own police forces. The story begins with Keyz, a kid who aspires to "make jazz" but hacks a studio's proprietary program to help him write it. He gets in trouble and reaches out to Tin Lizzy, a former criminal who has gone straight and creates background scenarios for other people's jazz. They go on the run from the studio's detective and try to find help as they travel across a near-future America.
One minor dislike in this book is that, while Tin Lizzy is developed as a character, many others aren't well-developed, particularly Keyz. You get a little background on him early, but then he's just a generic, sulky teenager for most of the rest of the book.
One thing I LOVED is that people in power are constantly dismissing women, the working class, the old and the disabled as being unable to fight back or accomplish anything, and the novel is FULL of queer women, older women, and working class folks who are outwitting those in power and helping other poor and oppressed people to get a leg up. Loved it. Will read more by Scott.
April 22, 2014
I found out about Melissa Scott's The Jazz at a conference about compsci education, of all places. Someone thought that describing imagery and ideas from this sci-fi (and others, truth be told) may jack up the attention of our students. Mhm. Anyway... This is the cyberpunk story of Keyz, the silent adolescent who's abput to make it big in the entertainment biz, and Lizzy, the techie with a dark past who's about to help him, against all odds and super-corp CEO G. G. Overall, ok but without much cyber.
I liked the writing. The descriptions are dense, the dialogue is sparkling and believable, the action scenes short enough for the word to carry speed and tension. I even liked the story, overall. It's a run of the mill thriller with a hint of policier, with lots of flashbacks and stick figures introducing story background. But there's also quality, in that the logics involving multiple characters (who goes where, who does what, and with whom) are well planned.
Now for the bad parts. The story: as you may have guessed, mills and cyberpunk don't lead to good entertainment, much like zombies and vikings, cowboys and aliens,... wait, what?! I've read this story in every cyberpunk ever written. The first time, I liked it petabytes. It was the 1990s...
Oh, and the logic of the personal decision. This is where I got literally out of my chair and started shouting at others: why did Lizzy help the kid? Why did the police girl help Lizzy? Why didn't Lizzy do *add ending scenes here* on oage 30, rather than 300? Why is the kid becoming a zombie on oage 20, never to speak again but happily accepting bondage until the end of the book? Why why... why?
You already got the point. But the make or break of any cyberpunk story remains, for me, the quality of the cyber. I absolutely loved Snow Crash for the Metaverse, which is still, 20 years later, a hot topic of research. I loved The Neuromancer for its distinct vision of cyberspace. I did not flinch too much when reading For the Win, for its quality story about online and offline privacy (or was it the Brother story?) But here? I'm left with lots of "jazz" and "smoke", which are left as undescriptive and are so overworked by every character in every conversation so as to not even count as tech. So no cyber.
So it was ok, but that's about all for me. Perhaps I'm not even apt to be a player in Melissa's universe.
I liked the writing. The descriptions are dense, the dialogue is sparkling and believable, the action scenes short enough for the word to carry speed and tension. I even liked the story, overall. It's a run of the mill thriller with a hint of policier, with lots of flashbacks and stick figures introducing story background. But there's also quality, in that the logics involving multiple characters (who goes where, who does what, and with whom) are well planned.
Now for the bad parts. The story: as you may have guessed, mills and cyberpunk don't lead to good entertainment, much like zombies and vikings, cowboys and aliens,... wait, what?! I've read this story in every cyberpunk ever written. The first time, I liked it petabytes. It was the 1990s...
Oh, and the logic of the personal decision. This is where I got literally out of my chair and started shouting at others: why did Lizzy help the kid? Why did the police girl help Lizzy? Why didn't Lizzy do *add ending scenes here* on oage 30, rather than 300? Why is the kid becoming a zombie on oage 20, never to speak again but happily accepting bondage until the end of the book? Why why... why?
You already got the point. But the make or break of any cyberpunk story remains, for me, the quality of the cyber. I absolutely loved Snow Crash for the Metaverse, which is still, 20 years later, a hot topic of research. I loved The Neuromancer for its distinct vision of cyberspace. I did not flinch too much when reading For the Win, for its quality story about online and offline privacy (or was it the Brother story?) But here? I'm left with lots of "jazz" and "smoke", which are left as undescriptive and are so overworked by every character in every conversation so as to not even count as tech. So no cyber.
So it was ok, but that's about all for me. Perhaps I'm not even apt to be a player in Melissa's universe.
September 28, 2013
A good, although not exceptional, cyberpunk novel. A teenage hacker uses a program he found on his parents' work network to spice up a computer piece he wrote for the "jazz" - a term that's used for the melange of online entertainment, 'spin', satire, gossip & etc. that is enormously popular - and a huge source of revenue - in the near future.
The quality of the piece gets him a commercial deal, and he's teamed up to work with a more experienced programmer - unfortunately, the program he used was confidential, groundbreaking technology, and the owner, a big media mogul, is ready to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. By coincidence, the programmer he just started working with HATES this media mogul, because he also threw the book at her when she was younger, working as a porn star/escort, causing her to spend 2 years in jail for a minor theft. So she is willing to go out of her way, risking her current job, to try to protect this kid.
It's a very well-written, entertaining novel, but the kid isn't really a very exciting protagonist (although the programmer is really cool), and the stakes don't really seem like they're high enough.
The quality of the piece gets him a commercial deal, and he's teamed up to work with a more experienced programmer - unfortunately, the program he used was confidential, groundbreaking technology, and the owner, a big media mogul, is ready to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. By coincidence, the programmer he just started working with HATES this media mogul, because he also threw the book at her when she was younger, working as a porn star/escort, causing her to spend 2 years in jail for a minor theft. So she is willing to go out of her way, risking her current job, to try to protect this kid.
It's a very well-written, entertaining novel, but the kid isn't really a very exciting protagonist (although the programmer is really cool), and the stakes don't really seem like they're high enough.
March 1, 2009
While leaving plenty to the imagination, this book conjures up a vivid future world where nothing is certain and where redemption is just a matter of summoning up a new identity. One of the best cyberpunk novels I've read in a long time.
March 8, 2012
Interesting post-internet novel without the grittiness of the typical cyberpunk genre. Melissa Scott is a skilled writer at creating characters with flaws, and letting them loose in trying times. Some of the plot tricks seemed a little too easy, but on the whole it is a strong novel.
August 9, 2007
A terrific ride, full of lots of neat twists and fantastic technology.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews