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Their names were Lancelot, Elaine, Percivale, Gawain, Modred, Lynette and Vivien, but they were not characters from legend. They were made people, clone servants designed to suit the fancy of their opulent owner, the Lady Dela Kirn. And they worked aboard the Maid, an anachronistic fantasy of a spaceship, decorated with swords, heraldic banners, old-looking beams masking the structural joints, and lamps that mimicked live flame. They lived in a kind of dream, and had no idea of their origins, their prototypes in those old, old story tapes of romance, chivalry, heroism and betrayal. Until a wandering instability, a knot in time, a ripple in the between sucked them into a spatial no-man's-land from which there seemed to be no escape. And they were left alone, with the borrowed personas of their ancient namesakes, to face a crisis those venerable spirits were never designed to master.… (more)
User reviews
Azi do not have names, they have numbers. But in the Dela household, the ones that are part of her close circle and the ones that crew on her ship, have names - straight out from Tennyson's "Idylls of the King". And in case you somehow miss the names, each chapter starts with a few lines from it, pointing to what happens in the story of the "Maid". It's an Arthurian tale - in an unusual setting, with strange protagonist but still, following the story.
At the start of the story the ship is preparing to leave the planet with the newest conquest of Dela, Griffin, on its usual trip for her to get annoyed and bored with her latest lover and return to Lance, the Azi programmed to love her. Except that Griffin is different - which makes the Azi a bit worried. And then the unexpected happens and just before they can take their drugs and jump through the stars, the ship is pulled... somewhere. And the race to try to escape is on. Or so everyone thinks anyway.
So what do you think happens when the Azis whose personality is based on tape and who are named after heroes of a tape actually experience that tape? Exactly what you imagine. Did the tape change their personality or did it just wake something that was already in them? Or was that always going to happen?
And just to make the things even more complicated, there is something outside... wherever they are.
While reading the novel, your opinion of what you are reading shifts between a love story, a horror story, a science fiction one and an Arthurian one. It is all of them and none of them. Because of that it has a few problems - in places the push to get it closer to the Arthurian makes the actual story illogical. And I wish that there was a bit less of the wide-eyed Dela and her knights. It's trying too hard in places to keep the different kinds of stories together and fails in doing that. And for all its complexity, it is predictable in places.
It is not one of Cherryh's strongest novels but it is still worth reading.
The Arthurian stuff didn't work for me, so mostly was interested in this as a precursor to the better known Cherryh stuff. Can see some echos of 40,000 in this too.