From Publishers Weekly
Journalist/editor Besher's first novel, falling somewhere among cyberpunk, Douglas Adams and "Buckaroo Banzai," has all the normal faults of amateurism and invents some of its own. Frank Gobi, professor of "transcultural corporate anthropology and organizational shamanism," a former "consciousness detective," is called in when Satori City, or "Virtualopolis," an online burg the size of Manhattan, crashes, stranding thousands of users, including Gobi's teenage son, Trevor. Behind the crash are the shenanigans of two Japanese megacorporations struggling over a Tibetan program, "Tantrix," that could make all of reality virtual. Gobi enters into virtuality to triumph over a virus that takes the form of Tibetan zombies and make the world safe for unreality. Along the way are irritating shifts in point of view, seemingly important characters who vanish, characters-including Gobi-who remain blanks, forced exposition, stilted dialogue, cliches, addled construction, and adolescent sexism. Frequent jokey uses of religious/mystical concepts, while sometimes adroit, are more often sheer gibberish. Besher has not given us a world in which mystical powers and high-tech/cyberscience can co-exist, never mind interact, and there is no internal logic here; Gobi does one impossible thing after another. Besher is clever, but this garbled, maladroit fiction remains a virtual novel at best.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
A savage corporate war results in the crash of the world's largest recreational virtual reality environment, stranding thousands of users in neural limbo. Dr. Frank Gobi, an experimenter on the fringe of psychic downloading, races against time to track down a rogue CEO and restore the system before the minds of those trapped inside are lost beyond recall. The author of The Pacific Rim Almanac (LJ 6/1/91) has envisioned a 21st century that will be born from the pairing of technological advances with Eastern mysticism. Sparkling prose, inventive plotting, and an engagingly self-deprecatory hero combine to produce a compelling sf thriller of the next century. A strong addition to sf collections.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
