Customer Reviews

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

 

 

So everything is a game? If we don't think it is, if we take it too seriously we are going to end up being bulls or Jamie. But if we play it as a game, we will have fun? Then if we play the game, we have to understand the rules of the game. If we don't know that it is a game, we live in it, do we become "bad" charactors--bulls, or do we become "Jamie"--the painfully concious person? I think Rushkoff is telling the reader to play, engage, and get out. Engage, play, win or lose, get out.

This is truly a must own book. If you are not familiar with this book, enjoy it, even savior it while you're reading it. This is the type of book that you never want to finish and when you do, you're practically bummed. The storyline is very innovative, the humor sharp and the pacings quick. The bottomline is this book is an excellent read.

I would love to go into particulars about the book but it's kind of a hard one to summarize. I would say that it's almost a cross of The Illuminatus Trilogy and SNOWCRASH. This next comment sounds like a lofty claim, but to me, this book was much better then stephenson's SNOW CRASH.

If you enjoy groundbreaking SCI-FI, I would highly recommend you looking further into this book. I can honestly say that it amazes me that this book never got more fanfare. Critics miss the boat all the time but this book is so good that it should have a grass roots or cult movement that keeps it selling.

Buy a copy, maybe that'll be the start, maybe not but I promise that after you finish reading the book you'll agree.

my god. this one blew me away. amazing i hadn't heard of it through normal review channels. destined to be a cult classic, rips through the end of the 20th century like no other satire. written in a wry witty way, with insight and humor.

weird to say, but it's a warm book about some cold people.

You can tell Rushkoff is a greenhorn novelist, as the plot falters at points. You often get the feeling that he's trying a bit too hard, but the care that he put into the novel just seeps through to cover up in technical failings. I love the human face Rushkoff puts on the dot.com mentalities of the late 90's. I was just waiting to piss on this book (it was given to me by a friend that usally has taste of that sort), but it was at least moderately enjoyable all the way through and absolutely outstanding a great deal of the time as well. PLUS, Dzama's illustrations are just great. Only thing I wish it that there were more of them.

I first learned about this book through Yahoo! Internet Life, when they still published the darn thing, and they printed a chapter in the magazine from the book along with information on how to contribute. Never got around to creating any footnotes, but I did buy a copy as soon as I remembered it's existence.

Unfortunately, the copy I got at the bookstore was missing some pages. I emailed the author and he responded that it was a known problem, and offered to email me PDFs of the pages I was missing. Preferring a full book, I went back to the bookstore, had them order 5 more copies, and traded when the new ones came.

Enough of that, though. This is a fantastic book that, in the words of another reviewer, may blow your mind. I pick it up and read it again probably once a year or so, and will be searching for it shortly to do so. The manuscript format was genius and perfect for this story.

A clever presentation (the novel as a found document from the distant future) sets an interesting tone for this bit of near-future speculative fiction. Overall, a pretty decent read with an excellent cautionary tale at its heart. Worth the read, especially if you're an aspiring author looking for an example of some "different" way of presenting your text.

"EXIT STRATEGY, the body encoder that the technojunkie was debugged to the human body pill paradise apparatus of this abolition world plug-in, to send back out cruel emulator of hyperreal HIV=scanner form era respiration-byte." - Kenji Siratori, author of Blood Electric