Extreemes [Import] [Paperback]

Christopher Priest (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing; New Ed edition (1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684819414
• ISBN-13: 978-0684819419
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,049,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and disturbing, December 2, 2001

By 

Kirk McElhearn "Freelance writer and translator" (A town in the French Alps) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Extremes (Paperback)

Christopher Preist writes stories that are on the fringe of science fiction. Calling him an SF writer is too limiting - he is a writer with imagination, who writes stories that stretch the limits of imagination.

This novel focuses on one character's virtual reality experiences. I won't bother to tell the story - another reviewer already did that. What stands out is this book, though, is the way the plot folds over and over, until the reader loses touch with reality.

I say this is a disturbing book as well - when I was reading it, I found it so skewed that I could only read a few paragraphs at a time. I had to stop and do something else for a few minutes, to anchor myself, before coming back to it. Nevertheless, I read it in one day.

This book incites a kind of subconscious itch, a discomfort that arises from not knowing what reality the characters is in. A brilliant work, along the same line as The Prestige, with its multiple realities.

In the end, this novel shows that the book is the ultimate virtual reality device. Preist's mastery of a complex plot leads the reader down dark paths to dead-ends, before finally coming to a totally unexpected resolution.

Great work, Chris.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining police procedural with a nightmarish IT future, April 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Extremes (Hardcover)

Two individuals, operating alone, simultaneously killed many innocent bystanders. One of them murdered his victims in Texas while the other did his vile deed in England. Among the victims in America was the spouse of FBI agent Teresa Simons, an expert in using the virtual reality program ExEx to reconstruct the crimes.

After investigating the Texas incident, Teresa travels to Bulverton, the site of the English incident. She plans to sue ExEx in order to find the link between the incidents because she knows that coincidence is astronomically remote in these cases. However, the corporate world does not want her uncovering potential negative feedback loops that could destroy their investment in ExEx and will treat her like a virus that needs eradication before she obliterates their investment.

Award winning author Christopher Priest (see THE PRESTIGE) writes a nightmarish look at information technology that will simply keep readers away from their keyboard just as "Jaws" kept people away from the beaches. The story line is clearly plot-driven as Mr. Priest extrapolates a possible future reality based on current information technology trends. The communication revolution may be upon us, but Mr. Priest paints it as an ugly and destructive weapon. THE EXTREMES is an extremely well written, non-stop entertaining novel.

Harriet Klausner

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Virtually real, June 18, 2002

By 

Steven Laine (Pleasanton, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Extremes (Paperback)

I picked this up by chance at a bookstore, never heard of the author prior. I was about 50 pages in when I recalled I had originally found it in the SF section. Where was the science fiction part of the story? This was starting out as just a good novel, cleanly written, with a great eye for insignificant detail that helps flesh out the tale. Having read SF throughout most of my reading career, I know most of it is plot driven with characters and settings just used to push along the nifty story. This book takes its time (luxuriates?) developing the main character, Teresa Simons, a real woman who adapts within character to the unfolding events. Its done so well I assumed the author was a woman. (He's not). She has grown up in England, the daughter of a career US military man,becomes an FBI agent, and one day loses her husband in a random spree massacre.

This is the kind of SF I need now and then, maybe the best kind; where the whole story isn't techy, there is just one added element/theme to a time that could otherwise be today, ExEx. (Extreme Experience, virtual reality on steroids.) The story takes a very pleasant ramble through Teresa's' life, and from time to time she does an ExEx scenario, first for FBI training and later through a commercial provider. The iterative process she goes through to improve her performance is the most interesting of the whole book. I want this in my life for home, work and social situations. It's like the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray, where he is trapped into relieving the same day over and over again, until he eventually he gets it right. How cool would that be??
The rich, lush detail of the novel echoes the supposed detail Teresa finds in the hyper-real VR scenarios. Eventually the plot becomes complicated as she enters an ExEx scenario during which she enters an ExEx scenario....and so on. It's like looking into two mirrors reflecting each other.

There were a couple of loose ends that didn't hit me until a few days after finishing. What happened to Nick and Amy, the folks who run the hotel? They just disappear from one page to the next after they sell their stories. Also, what is up with the execs from GunHo corp? They make a big splashy extrance and then they too exit stage right. I'm sure its all in here, I'm just too used to obvious plot points. Oh well, I'll pay more attention when I read it again.

So here's the question you'll have to solve: Does the whole story take place inside an ExEx, or does she only choose at the end to avoid "real" reality without her dead husband by staying permanently in a scenario?

Many books compell me to race through them to see what happens next. This made me keep coming back to enjoy spending a little more time with Teresa.