Customer Reviews

V. I.: Viral Intelligence

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I am not much of a SF fan, but this book is so fantastically creative and varied in its structure and subject matter that I fell in love with it. It is not the typical SF setting or story, which works quite well for the book. The use of myth, legend, and popular culture also helped enrich what otherwise would have been an oddly inaccessible fantasy setting.

This book is quite funny at times, which helps dispel SF and Fantasy's tendency to stay a little too serious. The characters are memorable, the plot is intricate and well-woven, and the writing itself is pleasant to read.

It is not high art, so it shouldn't be held to high art's standards. But for a Science Fiction book, it is one of the best I have ever read.

V.I. is not garbage like a certain reviewer has said. The plot twists, turns, and leaves your head spinning in some places. A certain level of intelligence is required to grasp the weaving story. If you are into cyber thrillers or just love reading great plots, get this book! I read this in 2 days and the loss of time was worth it!

I can't believe that a publisher actually would publish this thing, I hesitate to call it a book. Every other sentance is '... it was like ...' The story is told from a 3rd party viewpoint but he jumps into and out of the perspective. Not to mention that the main character appears to be a manifestation of the authors over inflated ego. He makes the character a super hero of sorts but it is transpartenly thin by the use of the 3rd person taling about himself that he is only stroking his own ego. The story appears to be a collection of short stories woven together by the thinest of threads. It is a shame that they killed a tree to print this garbage.

This book is remarkable in so many ways. Remarkably bad is just one of them.
Imagine someone writing a collection of totally unrelated short stories. Stories which were, probably, not bad, but not good enough to get the author published. Now imagine that author putting all of those short stories into a book, changing slices of them here and there to make them at least appear (rather clumsily) to be related to one another.
That seems to be what Debrandt has done here. Even the main thread that is supposed to tie all of these stories together into a cohesive whole seems forced, and written more like short fiction than a novel. There is no way to make yourself care about the characters, the worlds, or whether any of the plots even resolve themselves. By the time you reach the end of the book, you're just glad you're done with the thing.
The only character in this book who was even worth having a short story about, the ONLY character you will find even mildly interesting, doesn't even make it to the end of the book, and his end is so... so... well. Not impressive. Much like the rest of this novel.
All in all, if there were a way for me to go back in time and tell myself not to read this book, I'd do it. The only part of this experience I'll remember is how thoroughly unimpressive, boring, and even unpleasant this book was. This is one of those books that makes me hate being the guy who can't not finish a novel, no matter how bad it is, once I've started.

This book was incredible. It had every thing from geneticly designed species to little nono ticks that can rearange the molecular structure of just about any thing, and a amoeba like species called Toolies. Its Nuts! But at the same time it had a intriuging plot and kept me reading for hours on end. What really gets me though is when Sentry (thats me)gets his head chopped off by Hone's finger laser. That is just sad. Specially since Sentry is one of the best charecters in the book. But thats life. But in closing the charecters were intresting and actually had a personality (very vivid personalities)and the book has a plot where you can see whats ahead but you are surprised when something different happens than what you expect. I give this book 5 Stars.