Reviews for Dancers in the dark

The average rating for Dancers in the dark based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-12-12 00:00:00 Joel E Dillard After the events of Arachne, Carly Quester is living life as a fugitive, wanted for unspecified crimes against Data Control, but really mostly because of what she has, an archetype of incredible power (which is essentially magic). She's living with Pr. Spinner, a robot therapist and once the bane of her life, but now they've become unlikely friends. Carly gets a chance to put her life back together when she's hired for a mysterious job under a false identity, that requires her new abilities and pays a lot and promises to clear up her troubles, but she's not sure she can trust her employer, and there are other forces at work. I read this both because I already had it as part of a bundle, and because there were a few things I liked about the first book, and, as sometimes happens, I hoped the second book might shake out some of the bugs and improve. Unfortunately, rather the opposite happened. This book had all the things that irritated me about the first book, and none of the inventiveness. Instead, we get a poorly conceived (and to me tedious and annoying) "people living a tech-free tribal society in the middle of the city" subplot, another rather cliche one about AI supremacists, and a plot that didn't really feel like it went anywhere. Characters and their relationships seemed entirely different from the first book (Spinner herself was closer to the AI supremacist side in the first book and although the change is given lip service, it doesn't feel natural) and although they were generally less unlikable than the first book, I didn't really find much reason to be interested either. There were also believability issues in connecting to the previous book, a case that had been assigned to Carly when she was still a mediator and before she went on the run winds up becoming important as she tries to find the person and warn them of the legal shenanigans her former employers are planning... except, this is weeks, months even after she left and the previous book established the court system as being so lightning fast that the main character's entire struggles in the first book were caused because she delayed things by a few minutes. So it's hard to imagine that the case was still pending. Not ruling out trying the author again, but it'd have to be a completely different kind of book, I think.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-27 00:00:00 Brett Nunley Sequel to Arachne (which I read in January 2019). Telelinker Carly Nolan had an anomaly in a link was sent to a perimeter prober, Pr. Spinner. In a session they discovered an archtype. Spinner instead of turning over this information to R-X and who would probably kill Carly to get at the archtype, keeps it to herself and helps Carly hide from Data Control. They have just started working together when Carly is kidnapped and forced to work with an unknown mainframe. The aborigines disdain everything to do with telelinking, what they call the Unseen, but Ouija is coerced into dealing with Carly. Ouija has to deal with the personal conflict of having anything to do with Glass Land (other that steal from it) as well as the threat to the tribe. There is a push to get the abos to go to shelters where they'd get food, but also be registered. That would certainly lead to the end of their way of life and maybe worse. There was enough background given in the first couple of chapters that refreshed my memory of Arachne, enough that you could probably enjoy this one without having read Arachne. I liked the characters. The robots had their own personalities. Carly has a dilemma, she doesn't want to go from working for a heartless (maybe even evil) law firm to a mainframe that may be inimical to humanity.