Up Against It, an “essential,” action-adventure sf tale of bureaucrats and colonizers

Laura J Mixon’s fast-paced space-opera.

I first discovered Laura Mixon’s fiction in 1992. I was working at Toronto’s Bakka Books and I was the “cyberpunk guy,” so when I unpacked a new box from Tor Books and found her eco-thriller/cyberpunk debut Glass Houses at the top, I grabbed a copy and read it on my lunch-break:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/327799.Glass_Houses

I ended up hand-selling cases of copies of Glass Houses, talking up this ground-breaking eco-thriller by a feminist hard sf writer who was also a working environmental engineer to everyone who came through the door.

Glass Houses was the kickoff to the “Avatars Dance” trilogy (with Proxies and Burning the Ice), which went from strength to strength. But Mixon was a casualty of the “midlist collapse” — a disaster in which consolidation in distribution and mass-market bookselling (at grocery stores, etc) killed thousands of writers’ careers. These consolidated firms used databases to track sell-through, and let it be known that the wouldn’t carry any writer who didn’t meet expectations. It was a wipeout for many beloved, working writers.