Virtual Reality Series by Alexander Besher

In the wake of a mega-earthquake in 2027 Japan, the virtual-reality entertainment empire Satori Corporation attempts to rescue thousands of people trapped in virtual worlds, including the ten-year-old son of professor Frank Gobi. Reprint.

"Mir." The Russian word for "peace, " for "one world." Mir 3.0 is the code name for a piece of neural software that can change the world. And it's escaped carrying a virus that is hell-bent on doing just that. The year is 2036 and the world is in the grip of a new cold war. The Berlin Wall is back up and concentration camps have been recreated... more"Mir." The Russian word for "peace, " for "one world." Mir 3.0 is the code name for a piece of neural software that can change the world. And it's escaped carrying a virus that is hell-bent on doing just that. The year is 2036 and the world is in the grip of a new cold war. The Berlin Wall is back up and concentration camps have been recreated. It is an eerily familiar conflict with a chilling new twist -- this is a battle for control of cyberspace and the Wall and the camps are both of the virtual variety. It's a time when epidermal programming is the cutting-edge fetish among the fringe dwellers of the hacker underworld. These epidermal programs are sentient tattoos that can travel on-line and perform tasks for their owners on the Net. They can even move from body to body in forbidden techno-pagan rituals. Now the Mir virus is on the loose, traveling as a passenger on the tattoos. Like the tattoos, Mir can migrate from consciousness to consciousness, from body to body, from individuals to entire nations, both off-line and on-line. No one, "nothing, " is safe in its deadly path. Trevor Gobi, son of the legendary virtual reality investigator Frank Gobi, is on the trail of Mir. His girlfriend Nelly has become infected through a tattoo, a tattoo that assumes a phantasmic form of its own as it incubates on her body. as it threatens her very existence -- and the entire World Wide Net. "Mir" is the second novel in the Rim Trilogy. The first, "Rim, " was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and described as "a book destined to become a classic" by Paul Saffo, director of the Institute of the Future. National Public Radio's Moira Gunn called it "incrediblycompelling with its mix of technology and metaphysics, human consciousness, and virtual reality." In "Mir, " Besher presents a startlingly complete and daunting vision of a future where the on-line, virtual life has become fully as real and crucial to everyone's survival as mundane reality. It is a wildly imaginative, frighteningly believable thriller that is guaranteed to join "Neuromancer" and "Snow Crash" as defining paradigms of the cyberfuture. less

Cyberpunk glitz and biotechnology blend with warped Eastern mysticism in Alexander Besher's loosely linked Rim series. This began with Rim, set in 2027, and continued with Mir--in which one bizarre invention was sentient tattoos. By the time of Chi it's 2038 and the world is even weirder... moreCyberpunk glitz and biotechnology blend with warped Eastern mysticism in Alexander Besher's loosely linked Rim series. This began with Rim, set in 2027, and continued with Mir--in which one bizarre invention was sentient tattoos. By the time of Chi it's 2038 and the world is even weirder. Vast bootlegging operations deal in chi, a life-force energy that can be technomagically sucked from unwilling victims and used to give rich addicts enhanced intelligence, great sex, and even "short-time immortality." Meanwhile, hackers break into nature's equivalent of the Internet, whose central node is a tree in Indonesia that channels telepathic e-mail to apes and others--which includes, of course, "win a million bananas" spam messages. Orangutans are surgically and genetically remodelled into surrogate children for an increasingly infertile world: the human/ape species barrier is crumbling. A mysterious and decidedly offbeat global spiritual transformation is threatened. Besher mixes surreal comedy, a spice of gruesomeness, and enough weird sf ideas for half a dozen books. (Under-shell deodorant for snails? Good grief.) The plot is a wild roller-coaster ride that ends with several loose threads and a shaggy-dog punchline. Great fun, but Chi promises slightly more than it delivers. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk less