Mel Keegan's Mindspace

 Reviewed by Linda Hines

On the far frontier, life is tough when you’re a transspace pilot stripped of your license to fly. The good jobs go to graduate guildsmen who make the professional grade ... and who play by the guild’s rulebook.

Jack DiFalco broke the rules. Busted, he found himself on the wrong side of the law and the rough side of the guild -- and his crime was mindspacing … playing one of the incredible high-tech games which are changing the future of humanity. Playing not in VR, but in the gamespace, the total-immersion rigs where players enters the realm of the machine. And some of them don’t make it back out.

Kieron Charig is a transspace navigator. He went through guild school with Jack, but unlike Jack he has no patience for the game, or for gamers. Mindspacing is the major tool of the navigator’s trade – the big transspace ships are flown via a symbiotic relationship where the mind/machine interface is dangerously blurry. Kieron works there; he scorns to play there -- and like all transspace flightcrews he fears the consequences.

The irony is that it’s Kieron, not Jack, who will pay the ultimate price, while Jack is plucked out of a rough, dirty underworld and propelled into places more opulent than the games he has played. But success comes with strings attached, and at a high price. Jack will pay his dues with skill, courage and even sex. For Kieron Charig, no price is high enough, and every moment is a battle to preserve what remains of his humanity.

Everything they are, everything they might be, pivots on Max Gorodin -- who stands at the helm of the aerospace giant, Jabalpur Indistries. Max’s own struggle is about sheer survival -- and if Jack DiFalco is his dream come true, Kieron Charig is the gift he could never have expected.

Max stands at a dangerous juncture where his own personal security is dubious and his enemies seem invincible. When Jack and Kieron cross his path, his life -- and the survival plans for a company and a city – have the potential to turn around. But both Jack and Kieron must forfeit everything they have … and Max will discover that falling in love is life’s ultimate complication.

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