Jaron Lee Knuth

Fun! Not entirely sure that there's enough meat behind the plot to drive a full series, but as a standalone it's a good concept, well executed and thought through.

In a future over populated world, humankind has retreated to superstructure towers scattered across all landmasses, whose inhabitants spend most of their lives in virtual worlds courtesy of one man's invention, the NextWorld. A linked global internet government of servers and domains hosting everything from parties and education to games and jobs. A small real world presence is still required - ablutions and feeding the nutritious paste required for the bodies nanomachines to do their thing. Our hero Kave, has only one friend, and apart from an absent but politically connected father, no family either. He spends nearly all of his free time gaming. The friend Xen was a chance encounter who's just happened to stick around, and is very much into an omnipresent spirituality expression, which is very odd in the technological freedom of the NextWorld. But anyway, Kave and Xen get a chance to try out a beta demo of the forthcoming next release of Kave's all time favourite game. Xen isn't really into gaming but agrees to give it a shot. Kave is wow'd by the textual detail that they've gone into and the realism that they've given the NPCs. He finds it very odd to game with a group, but quickly realises this is the way to earn more experience very rapidly, and eventually hooks up with a few other odd souls. The game resets once a night logging the players out, and re-setting the various problems and NPC positions. The next day Kave is straight back in, but finds his group unable to logout! they are trapped within an increasingly violent game, meanwhile of course their physical bodies are suffering. They know they only have to survive for a short duration until the government will come and rescue them - however one of their group admits to hacking into the game, and so won't be rescued. This gives them extra incentive to try and find the way out - although Kave is still quite unsure about the worthwhile dynamics of gaming as a group.

Lots of good analogy, and ethical commentary - how real is an online presence, is it a sacrifice etc. Nothing over the top, mostly just a lot of fun - and I don't FPS games at all. I don't buy the AI explanation given for the cause, but it just about makes coherent sense, so I can live with it. I'm really unsure what ground the sequel has to cover though, unless it's looking a completely different domain than the gaming one.… (mer)

The Infinite Life of Emily Crane by Jaron Lee Knuth

I like this book it's written well. What I had trouble with is following the development of the main character but there's an identifiable reason for this.

This book is a slow starter and comes off as a Young Adult teen angst story. Then it sort of digresses to shock fiction and then segue's into some philosophical fluff. So it's really three stories and that's where I got confused because it made it difficult to connect the three character personalities in the story.

As the story begins we have the angsty overweight possibly Plain Jane teen Emily Crane who is lucking in having had a boyfriend, but unlucky in having lost him to a car accident. She's trying to deal with that along with being an outcast in school. She also has to deal with the fact that she had just broken up with the boyfriend prior to his accident and that she witnesses other students being abused by the peers in a fashion perhaps worse than she has been abused. She does nothing about it.

This leads to disaster when the twins get tired of the abuse and go on a killing rampage and Emily is in the way and is one of the casualties. Emily dies, but that's not the end. Emily is an immortal and can't be killed so easily.

The next part of the story is a rather gruesome piece involving everything that a certain secret group of government funded people do with Emily to try and understand what makes her different. Were talking worse things than what happened with Stephen King's Firestarter - and everyone knows how that worked out for those people. Emily is trapped in a nightmare situation with no way out. Emily does get a buff body out of it but it not as funny or entertaining as Bette Midler in Ruthless People.

The last or third part is of course the escape and the people who are like Emily who come to save the day. But are these people any better than the one's who have systematically tortured her for over twenty years?

The one single troublesome detail I found was created by the very gruesome nature of the second part of this novel. What it involved is Emily's road to recovery from those long years of torture- yes at the beginning she wants to kill them all but she gets over way too quickly and I'm not sure I understood how or why she lost her anger despite recognizing the toll it was taking on someone who was becoming close to her..

To say anything more would be too much spoiling.

This story is a good tale of the transformation of Emily- not from mortal to immortal but from angsty teenager to a well rounded woman and is not a bad tale all the way around and this book gives me one of the few times I can honestly say that the end has TMI. I think as a reader the transformation of Emily was the story and that diatribe wrap-up at the end seemed a distraction.

The place in the middle with all the abuse has it's place but is overplayed and should result in a Firestarter ending. But to understand or disagree with this you are going to have to read the story. That's a good thing because it's entertaining and mostly well paced.

For once I'd have been happy to have been left hanging there as to how the rest of the story was about to pan out.

Interesting Science Fiction Fantasy read for all lovers of that Genre: contains elements of horror that make it questionable for Young Adults.

J.L. Dobias… (mer)