First I would like to say that one previous reviewer seems to equate this with a war/combat book. It is not. It is more akin to Michael Crichton's "Prey." Nor do I agree with the reviewer who felt that the female protagonist became too much of a good thing. Did she save the world? No, not by herself. Because of the deaths of others, the final actions fell to her.
Why she does what she does in the end is shaped by what happens in the beginning. That beginning is, putting yourself in her position, rather scary. Finding yourself in the middle of a financial and social meltdown in a different culture would be pretty scary. I like the way Williams plays out the situation. It has the ring of truth. There are bad people and there are good people. Different people have different agendas. Our girl is lucky she has not only a rich friend, but a resourceful group of people who use the "six degrees" to arrange an escape.
One of the interesting things is how the group functions. There are a couple of references to "the group mind" which do not seem so far off.
In fact, we see intelligent agents in the form of software and wetware.
The former are an example of the law of unintended consequences. And of the idea of emergence, where from the (not quite random) small-scale actions of many low-level software agents a large scale action can occur.
The use of the resource of the multitudes playing the game (which is of the type known as alternate reality game, where players get clues and points for solving intermediate puzzles on the way to running the script to its conclusion) is fascinating. Not only do you use the player's computing powers but also their real-life skills. Some are innocent pawns serving the aim of the villain, some the aims of the game or of the meta-game that involves the life and death situation the heroine finds herself in.
The book in some sense does not break new ground, but it does tell a good story well. The netbots, for example, could be the programs that currently do automated trading. We have seen in real life how it is sometimes necessary to thwart them to prevent major financial damage. Those are fairly simple codes. The kind let loose here are not so controllable.
And it is important to realize that whenever something bad does happen because of the actions of the software, it is because humans have created the situation that the software is able to exploit. The evil ultimately derives from human action or inaction.
All in all, a very good read. Lots of good ideas, well exploited.
