Customer Reviews

The Extremes

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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

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.

Teresa Simons has the idea that a random shooter in Bulverton, England is somehow linked to the random shooting that killed her husband in Texas. She uses the experience of ExEx, a kind of super virtual reality, to dig out the link.

I generally really appreciate Priest's writing, and was actually surprised by how much I didn't like _The Extremes_. While I found the setup to be an interesting one, I never gained much interest in or sympathy for Teresa and found the character development in general to be weak. Moreover, the resolution (if you want to call it that) was overly complicated and went farther towards satisfying the author's interest in playing with ideas of Reality (explored much better in his other novels) than it did towards providing a decent ending for this novel.

Worth a read if you can get it from the library, but otherwise I'd take a miss.

I am certainly surprised that some of the previous reviewers found this book dull. I found it to be that rarest of books for me--a genuine page-turner! Priest understands that reality is a construct of our minds based on sensory input. The consequences, then, of all-encompassing virtual reality are worked out in this fine and exciting novel. Don't miss it if you think you might enjoy a novel that is easy to read but challenging in its concepts.

This is a rather frustrating book -- generally well written, filled with interesting ideas, but sometimes inconsistent and sometimes simply unbelievable. Teresa Simmons and her husband are trained FBI field agents in what seems to be our present, except that both were trained with the help of an extremely sophisticated virtual reality system that put them into various roles in a wide range of historically-based "killer" scenarios. Through repeated insertions into each scenario, they had to learn to react appropriately and to survive the situation. (The process seems extremely wasteful of personnel, not to mention impossibly expensive.) Anyway, her husband is killed in the line of duty in a small Texas town and Teresa, trying to cope with her loss, discovers a similar mass killing took place at the same time on the same day in a small town in the south of England. So, naturally, she goes off to Sussex to look around. (Huh?) Then she begins patronizing the local virtual reality provider and discovers a whole new kind of "shareware" virtual experience. (If she's so well trained and informed, why had she never heard of this before?) The overlap between the incidents in Texas and England become more pronounced and Teresa's virtual experiences become more complicated, until everything comes to a head in a scenario within a scenario . . . sort of. The problem is, Priest assumes that a woman experiencing a man's role in virtual reality -- including sexual activity -- won't react any differently than she had as her own self. This seems extremely unlikely. And he has a very shaky grasp of what West Texas is like, even though he was previously married to Texan author Lisa Tuttle. And nothing is ever really resolved. It's like he was three-quarters of the way through writing and re-writing the book, and just stopped.

Don't get me wrong, Christopher Priest is one of Britain's greatest (and most underated) authors, and I would give most of the other books he has written 4 or 5 stars. But despite the critical plaudits and the award shortlistings and Priest's trademark melancholy dream-like style, this is not his best.

Yes, it has interesting ideas, yes, it is well-written, and tackles difficult subjects in a worthy way, but it is ultimately a little stale and dull.

I've read a handful of Priest's novels and this is the first one to disappoint me. The Extremes is like certain types of food: it seems nourishing at first but soon betrays itself as empty calories. Much of the book is concerned with the everyday lives of a couple of people affected by the events that are central to the story. But these characters actually have nothing to say. We learn nothing from them and then, in the final third of the book, they simply vanish, leaving the reader wondering why we met them at all. The same applies to a group of enigmatic employees from a software manufacturer. Priest expends a good deal of energy making them seem mysterious and then as soon as they appear they're gone again, to no purpose and with no explanation.

As for the virtual reality aspect, which is, after all, the fulcrum of the story, Priest seems ill-at-ease with this technology. He fails to understand the concept or its potential, and uses it without finesse.

This book is also poorly written. The prose is weary and leaden, containing many clichés and worn-out characters. There is none of Priest's trademark wistfulness or the wonderful ethereal imagery he produces so well in his better works, such as Inverted World, A Dream of Wessex, or The Affirmation.

I happily recommend the other Priest novels I've mentioned above, but The Extremes is nothing but smoke and mirrors, and is best avoided.

Christopher Priest is one of the best SF writers around, and he seems much less well-known in the US than perhaps he should be. He made quite an early splash with books like Fugue for a Darkening Island and The Inverted World, and with short stories like the remarkable "An Infinite Summer." His later books (such as The Affirmation, The Glamour, and most recently The Prestige) have been typically on the boundary between SF and the mainstream, which perhaps accounts for the diminished notice he has received within the American SF field. His newest novel, The Extremes, published in 1998 in the UK and just now coming out in the US, is also on that boundary, and it's another good one.

Teresa Simons is an FBI agent married to another agent. When her husband is killed in Kingwood City, Texas, trying to capture a serial killer, Teresa, recovering, ends up travelling to England where she was born. She visits a seaside town named Bulverton where another serial killer went on a rampage the same day Teresa's husband was killed.

In Bulverton, Amy Colwyn and Nick Surtees are trying to make a go of Nick's parents' hotel/pub, which Nick inherited when his parents were murdered by the killer who also killed Amy's husband. However, neither knows much about running a hotel, nor is it what they really want from life, and their dissatisfaction is affecting their rekindled relationship.

So, Teresa comes to Nick and Amy's hotel. She tries interviewing the locals, trying to come to an understanding of their reactions to the serial killings in their town, but she doesn't make much headway. She ends up spending her time in a Virtual Reality simulation called Extreme Experience, something she also used in her FBI training, but in this case reviewing VR tapes of the Bulvertion murders.

So far, this is a fairly straightforward near-mainstream novel. It's apparently set right about present time, and Priest has inserted the unlikely virtual reality technology as if it exists now. The scenes in ExEx are well done, believable and scary, and comment on our fascination with violence -- and to some extent on our complicity with it -- subtly, without lecturing. The writing is excellent, and the characters are fairly well drawn, although Teresa did a couple of things that I didn't quite buy.

Ah, but this is Christopher Priest. Anyone who has read a lot of Priest, especially, say, his very fine early novel A Dream of Wessex (aka The Perfect Lover), won't be terribly shocked at the direction The Extremes takes towards the end. Priest seems fascinated with reality and how our consciousness creates our reality, and as such could hardly be expected to resist the temptation presented by a subject such as extremely realistic VR simulations. His speculations here jump off the extrapolation track a bit, in my opinion, but they are fascinating, and the ending of this novel takes on a certain logic of its own. It's moving and interesting, and well constructed. I had a little trouble, as I've hinted, quite believing in it, but it works on its own terms. That said, I was left feeling a bit like I'd read two books: one about what a cover blurb calls "the pornography of violence" and how people react and adapt to it; and another about consensus reality, and how VR might expand or alter that reality. Both subjects are interesting, and I still found this an absorbing novel, one of the best of 1998.

Mr. Priest is a good writer. That much is apparent. And the earlier reviewer who characterized this as a plot-driven novel is right. It certainly isn't character driven. I had a hard time believing that the main character was real, and not just contrived to fit a certain ideology. I did not end up knowing the main character, so much as I knew the English author's view of what a middle-aged female Anglo-American widow FBI agent was like. The gulf between author and character seemed a bit too vast for Mr. Priest to bridge.

I did, however, like his description and tone and thought the plot was intriguing. Not a bad book, but ultimately unsatisfying.