The Demi-Monde: Winter: A Novel (The Demi-Monde Saga) [Hardcover]

Rod Rees (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 27, 2011 | Series: The Demi-Monde Saga

The Demi-Monde:

1. A subclass of society whose members embrace a decadent lifestyle and evince loose morals.

2. A shadow world where the norms of civilized behavior have been abandoned.

3. A massive multiple-player simulation technology that re-creates in a wholly realistic cyber-milieu the threat-ambiance and no-warning aspects of a hi-intensity, deep-density, urban Asymmetric Warfare Environment.

4. Hell.

Welcome to the Demi-Monde, the ultimate in virtual reality—a military training ground and vivid, simulated world of cruelty and chaos run by psychopaths, madmen and fanatics.

If you die here, you die in the Real World . . .

In the year 2018, the Demi-Monde is the most sophisticated, complex and unpredictable computer simulation ever created, devised specifically to train soldiers for the nightmarish reality of urban warfare. A virtual world of eternal civil conflict, its thirty million inhabitants—“Dupes”—are ruled by cyber-duplicates of some of history’s cruelest tyrants: the fanatical Nazi butcher Reinhard Heydrich; Stalin’s arch executioner Lavrentii Beria; the torture-loving Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada; the Reign of Terror’s bloodthirsty mastermind Maximilien Robespierre.

But something has gone horribly wrong inside the Demi-Monde, and the U.S. president’s daughter, Norma, has been lured into this terrifying shadow world, only to be trapped there. Her last hope of rescue is Ella Thomas, an eighteen-year-old jazz singer and very reluctant heroine. But when Ella infiltrates the Demi-Monde and begins her hunt for Norma, she soon discovers the walls containing the evils of this simulated environment are dissolving—and the Real World is in far more danger than anyone knows. With the help of resistors determined to understand their world, Ella must race to save Norma and stop an apocalypse . . . but the clock is ticking.

Blending fact and fantasy, history and religion, military and existential themes, epic adventure and dark wit, dystopia and steampunk in a wholly original and driving narrative stream, The Demi-Monde: Winter is inventive fiction at its finest.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Already published to acclaim in the UK, this highly imaginative novel, the first in a projected series, blurs the line between reality and computer-generated fantasy until the line simply ceases to exist. Ella Thomas, an 18-year-old jazz singer, is recruited for a dangerous and mind-boggling job, to go inside the Demi-Monde, an elaborate computer program designed to train combat soldiers, and bring out the daughter of the president of the U.S., who has become stranded inside it. Like Philip Jose Farmer’s classic Riverworld series, the novel features an assortment of historical characters from various eras (its primary villains are the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich and black magician Aleister Crowley), and the Demi-Monde, a computer-construct with its own geographical, political, religious, and social structure, may remind some readers of the film The Matrix. Despite similarities to genre classics, the book stands on its own two feet. It’s elegantly constructed, skillfully written, and absolutely impossible to stop reading. It ends on a beauty of a cliffhanger, too, pretty much guaranteeing that readers will be biting their nails until the sequel appears. --David Pitt

Review

“Explosively creative barely defines Rod Rees’s The Demi-Monde Winter. It blew me away as the novel skated on the razor’s edge between where we are today and where we’re headed tomorrow. As much a cautionary tale as a gripping thriller cut from a digital cloth.” (James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Devil Colony )

“Strong characters, along with the clever interweaving of seemingly disparate plot threads, make this a standout selection for fans of high-tech sf and cyberfiction.” (Library Journal.com (starred review) )

“Novel and fresh….An adventure tale wrapped in a computer simulation.” (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review )

“A brilliant, high concept series that blends science fiction and thriller, steampunk and dystopian vision. If Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson, James Rollins, and Clive Cussler participated in Suzanne Collins’s THE HUNGER GAMES, the result might be something akin to the dark and ingenious madness of Rees’s THE DEMI MONDE: WINTER.” (BookReporter (starred review) )

“Elegantly constructed, skillfully written, and absolutely impossible to stop reading.” (Booklist (starred review) )

“Superb….Such an inventive world is engrossing on its own, but the wildly unpredictable plot and characters make for plenty of surprises and twists.” (Wichita Eagle )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; Reprint edition (December 27, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062070347
• ISBN-13: 978-0062070340
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,132,880 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars One more acronym and murder will be done. December 27, 2011

By Katherine Hooper VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

"One more acronym and murder will be done."

To train soldiers for different high-stress combat scenarios, the U.S. military has developed a virtual reality game called The Demi-Monde. The game world is divided into different sections with boundaries like spokes on a wheel. These adjacent sections are overpopulated and made up of different mixtures of races and cultures that should clash and create wars. In addition, scientists have used the DNA of real historical people to create "Dupes" (duplicates) of actual historical tyrants and other bad guys to populate the Demi-Monde with the kinds of people who are likely to initiate conflicts. These dupes think they are real people and that the people who come in from the real world are "Daemons." To make it as realistic as possible, when U.S. soldiers are in training in the Demi-Monde, their brains are completely immersed -- they are not aware that they're only playing a game. However, this leaves their consciousness separated from their bodies so that if they are killed in the game, they slip into a vegetative state in real life.

When Norma Williams, the U.S. President's daughter, is kidnapped and held hostage in the Demi-Monde, the government must figure out how to rescue her. They hire Ella Thomas, a black jazz singer, to go into the game and bring Norma out.

The Demi-Monde: Winter has an entertaining premise and I've been looking forward to reading it since I heard about it more than a year ago. Unfortunately, I could not finish it. I worked on it for 6 weeks and I had to keep starting over. It was the only print book I was reading at the time and I dreaded picking it up -- I just couldn't get into it. One problem is that the writing is not engaging; it is merely utilitarian and, though it often attempts to be witty, it usually doesn't succeed. The second problem is that there is a lot of information about the world dumped on the reader at the beginning, so the plot takes a long time to wind up.

The biggest problem, though, the one I couldn't get past, was the outrageous beliefs of the Demi-Mondians and the way these are presented. All of their ideas (mostly radical racism and sexism) are ideas we've heard before, which makes sense because the people who tend to rise to the top in the Demi-Monde are the Earth's former tyrants, but their beliefs are conveyed in such a ham-fisted manner that, lacking any subtlety, they become cartoonish. What makes them even more laughable (except that I wasn't laughing, I was wincing) is the way they're explained in scholarly quotes at the beginning of each chapter:

"HerEticalism is a Covenite religion based on female supremacy and the subjugation of men. Rabidly misandric in nature, the HerEtical belief is that Demi-Monde-wide peace and prosperity -- an unfeasibly idyllic outcome given the tag "MostBien" -- will only be realized when men ("nonfemmes" in Coven-speak) accept a subordinate position within society. HerEticalism has a more aggressive sister religion known as Suffer-O-Gettism (a contraction of Make-Men-Suffer-O-Gettism) which espouses violence as the only means of bringing change in the Demi-Monde. Suffer-O-Gettes are of the opinion that the removal of the male of the species from the breeding cycle is a vital concomitant to the securing of MostBien. Such are the unnatural and obscene sexual activities of HerEticals that they are lampooned throughout the Demi-Monde as "LessBiens.""

These kinds of awful puns (and equally ridiculous acronyms) gallop unbridled through the entire novel. MALEvolent, HimPerialism, nanoBites, pawnography, PsyChick (a cute female who assists a psychic during his presentations), Terror Incognita, ThawsDay, UnFunDaMentalism, woeMen, neoFights... If you're into masochism, you can read the official dictionary of Demi-Monde slang.

This nearly drove me insane. Despite its dull writing style, I was interested in the plot of The Demi-Monde: Winter, but it's kind of hard to get through it when you're rolling your eyes during every line of text and then have to keep finding your place again. I finally quit halfway through.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Rollicking And Brutal: Utilizes Aspects From History And Science Fiction For One Of the Year's Most Unrelenting Action Tales November 5, 2011

By K. Harris HALL OF FAMETOP 10 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Author Rod Rees takes a supremely cool premise in "The Demi-Monde: Winter" and runs with it, creating one of my favorite action/adventure epics in quite some time. While not a perfect novel by any means--some of the characterizations are rather thinly drawn and I don't dare to dig too deeply into the scientific and technological aspects of the story--I can say that, for me, what I got was more than enough to compensate for any perceived shortcomings. Simply put, I loved this book. It has a relentless pace, an ingenious setting, and an intriguing historical element--all of which appealed to me immensely. But more than anything, it was just fun. Yes, dark, disturbing, and violent--but fun! Perhaps that's a strange (and inappropriate) way to categorize a novel populated with some of history's most brutal and reprehensible villains, but I found myself tearing through the pages of this book to see what would happen next. I'm certainly not a particularly effusive person, but something really connected with me here.

The concept at the heart of "The Demi-Monde: Winter" is easily its most salient selling point. The Demi-Monde is an artificially constructed, fully immersive simulation model used to train soldiers for impending combat missions. The virtual environment has been stacked to make it extremely volatile and unpredictable with a global climate of racial, cultural, and sexist inequality and hatred. To further complicate matters, the world is filled with accurate replications of some very evil, unscrupulous, and/or notorious historical figures. From the bloody reign of the Third Reich to appearances by or mention of notables representing Robespierre, Borgia, Shaka Zulu, Marx, Trotsky, and Empress Wu among numerous other personages--the book provides a fascinating alternate reality that I simply loved. I won't divulge too much of the story, but the main plot point revolves around the president's daughter who gets trapped in this make believe, but very real, dimension. A daring rescue is plotted and an ordinary young woman must enter the Demi-Monde to navigate its dangers and find the missing girl.

Once we enter the world of the Demi-Monde, the action is non-stop and the plotting moves at a breakneck pace. There are a lot of interesting characters, some emerge as unlikely heroes and some descend into power-hungry egomania. The main action set piece of the story plays out in the Warsaw Ghetto as German troops move to annihilate the trapped community. This fantastical blend of factual elements with over-the-top fiction really works and the real aspects of history provide an unexpected gravitas to an atypical adventure tale. It is important to note, however, that as the planned first novel of a series (one for each season, I would presume), the story leaves things hanging. I found this to be a truly invigorating and involving read, and I will be the first in line when Spring shows up. Great fun, but especially intriguing if you have an interest in or knowledge of history. KGHarris, 11/11.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm ready for Spring! February 28, 2012

By Word Nerd

Format:Hardcover

Imagine a world where the most evil and diabolical of leaders through history exist contemporaneously. Place them in a manufactured world, where overpopulated districts are crowded side by side, with invasion never more than a day's march away. Add a healthy dose of misery and class warfare to the mix and you have the basic ingredients for the Demi-Monde.

The basic premise is one that has been seen before- the military has created a virtual reality training program that has gone rogue. Fortunately, beyond that overdone premise, there is nothing basic about this story. Rees has created an intricate world populated with engaging characters who move the story along at breakneck speed.

At times you feel like you know where the story is headed- after all, it is based on real people and events in history, but a turn of the page reminds you that this story belongs to Rees, not history. You can predict, prognosticate and just plain old guess- but you will not know where this is going until you reach the final page.

My verdict: Read it! The Demi-Monde Winter has the potential to be the next big thing in publishing, so get in on the front end and be tragically hip at your next book club meeting.