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Deadly Perversions
This wild novel has a great caricature of Howard Stern and his crew. If you love Howard, he's in the book. If you hate him, Arquette kills him off in chapter 15 (and quite violently I may add). Lots of good computer stuff in it for bit-heads. Tons of Cybersex for chick-heads. It's written in a fascinating self-effacing style where there are just as many laughs to break up the tension as there are chills. I highly recommend this read for anyone under 40. Over that, (unless you're somewhat feral) I don't think you'll get it.
I can't think of a way to traditionally walk you through the book and summarize it, because there are simply too many subplots and wacky characters to do a scene-by-scene breakdown, so if that's what you're looking for it's best to read the back cover of the book.
I'd like to concentrate on Arquette's writing style, which is so unique that I feel there are many reasons this book will become a breakout cult classic bestseller.
First, the novel moves at the speed of light, short, quick, entertaining chapters that keeps you flipping pages trying to find a stopping point, but to no avail. I found I had read half of it before even realizing I had spent hours doing so.
Second - it's fun! How many books can you say were really fun to read, especially fiction thrillers that spend half the time describing characters that get violently killed off right after you get to know them. Arquette's book has zero fluff in it. He has traded in the violence for sex (one of the two are a must for any best selling novel), yet he wrote the book in a way where it doesn't take itself too seriously. I found myself laughing my ass off many times, wondering if this was a thriller or a comedy, but Arquette structured the chapters so the laughs come in just where they're needed, cutting some tension, allowing the reader to take a breath before being consumed in the plot, yet again.
Third - Arquette keeps you guessing. Just when you think you have it figured out, another twist pops up, another character is introduced, and another finding from the CDC comes out, which leads you off in another directly. If you've read the first 21 chapters off his website (for free) don't presume to think you've actually read any of the book or could guess the ending. Not possible unless you have a crystal ball running Linux.
Fourth - It's written in a style I've never read before. I can't compare Arquette to any other writer, which in itself is something of an accomplishment. There are so many authors whose work just blends in with others until their styles all seem the same. Arquette's style, however, is smart and blunt. Where other authors imply things, Arquette writes them in black and white. He takes on subject matter that other authors would just assume leave alone, yet does a wonderful job of spinning it so the characters actions seem perfect reasonable to the character himself.
And lastly, there is freshness in the author's soul, and he writes young, as if he's catering to an 18 through 39 demographic. Most best selling author's are over forty and really don't write their books for the 'instant gratification' world the younger generation is experiencing. For example, books such as Stephen King's bloated 900-page Dream Catcher would have been a tight and quick 400 page novel if Arquette had written it.
I also like Arquette's website and the fact that he's determined to let readers download and read roughly a third of each of his books, before you buy. Some authors let you read a few pages, maybe a few chapters, but Arquette believes if you are going to shell out $15 bucks for a book, you should be able to read enough of it to really know it's something you want to purchase. It will be interesting to see how long his editors let him get away with that, but I find it refreshing that he has that mindset.
You can purchase Deadly Perversions from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
What?
I thought hairy palms were the only risk I was taking.
> There are so many authors whose work just
> blends in with others until their styles all
> seem the same. Arquette's style, however, is
> smart and blunt
Smart and blunt? That how I would describe Chuck Palahniuk's (hope I didn't butcher that) style. If the name doesn't ring a bell, I have two words for you: Fight Club.
This post is free (as in cheese in a mousetrap).
The whole point of tinysex is that you can't catch anything from it.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
I was just explaining to my co-irker how to mount a floppy drive in linux. Every time I said "mount" he laughed. He said I had "an unhealthy obsession with technology." Two minutes later I go to /. and find this article. This is some kind of strange cosmic coincidence right?
I was not touched there by an angel.
Dude, this is slashdot. We got people here running Beowulf clusters of Crystal Balls bootin' Linux.
real virus that's spread via hardware/ software... Poof! Kills you in 72 hours."
:-)
Just Wait til the RIAA tries to implement this "copy protection scheme" MWHAHAHAHAHA.......
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
A virus which kills after 72 hours and is only transmitted by cybersex is doomed. That timespan is too short for the infection to spread. The deadliest viruses are those which have long incubation times with no symptoms at all.
death after viewing something on the internet...
hmmm...
oh yeah... Fear Dot Com
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Um
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Man, I sure feel sorry for you modem users stuck with text these days. With cable and kazaa, I get all the porn flicks I want.
--sdem
..would be Snow Crash. Alright, alright, so I haven't read Deadly Perversions, but doesn't it sound a bit cheesy? 3D cybersex gives you an STD? Whereas the Snow Crash virus tries to propogate through several means.
Besides, Neal Stephenson is cool, we all know that.
If people acted out more perversions in cyberspace instead of the real world, we'd all be better off.
For every person who rants about someone dissing people under 30, there's a schmuck like this guy who says that "no one over forty will get it". People are all different and just because his parents were dull and stupid doesn't mean everyone over 40 is. I would never be so rude as to claim that someone is too young (or too old) to understand what I write about because I've encountered far too many of both sorts who are stimulating and interesting.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
What the hell kind of term is that? All heterosexual males are chick-heads? Are you implying that those of us who like women more than we care about the purity of sci-fi or whatever other geek-cred nonsense you want to apply to it are somehow flawed? if so, that's freakin' scary. Do you not like women? Are you asexual?
Or if you're gay, forget I said anything.
Thats ridiculous. Your argument could also be directed to science-fiction writers in general : "If you love science so much that you spend all day writing about it, why dont you do science?". Well, the answer is often that it is very rare that a good scientist can write about science well and it is also rare that a good writer can do good science. So why not have writers write about science?
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
"She was killed by that computer virus." Good god.
... and now the same nonsensical garbage is being lauded in a book?
... and while science fiction and fantasy often takes liberties with the possible and probably, spewing utterly nonsensical tripe like that IMHO simply requires too much of a suspension of disbelief to even be worthwhile, while alas preying on the illiteracy of others and clouding their understanding of real technologies further.
The show sucked regardless (perhaps even more than this book apparently does), but with that line it surpassed my tolerance threshold and I summarilly shut it off (and have studiously avoided it since). What utter crap
Please.
Its hard enough to educate people that computer viruses aren't real viruses, that memory (RAM) is volitile storage lost upon shutdown, while the hard drive ("memory" as it is called by some) is persistent, etc. etc.
We are already dealing with an abysmal state of computer literacy
The very, very worst of what science fiction can be (in stark contrast to Greg Egan's works, which educate as well as entertain, and often expand your imagination in the process, and to plenty of other speculative works that don't educate, but do entertain and at least don't misinform and cloud real issues in the process).
Thanks, but I'll give this one a miss.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Wait a minute - wasn't "cybersex" sort-of the envisioned killer app back around 1994 or 1995? Hasn't anyone figured out that it's not happening, or that it never really happened? It seems kind of pointless to write about it, and even more pointless to read about it. What's this guy's next book going to be about? The characters are surfing the web in 3-D and talking in 3-D chat rooms? These are the sorts of cliches that non-technical people scoop up, not the Slashdot crowd.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
I highly recommend this read for anyone under 40. Over that, (unless you're somewhat feral) I don't think you'll get it.
;-)
I will be too old to understand this book by the end of the week! Need to download and complete it quick
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Naw...but when they keep pointing out I have feelings for CowboyNeal...
What's this Submit thingy do?
"Poof! Kills you in 72 hours"
:p
Big deal. I know of a VHS tape that will kill you in 7 days
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Uh-oh. Either:
the reviewer doesn't read a lot, or
Arquette has figurted out something that Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Pynchon missed, or
Arquette's writing is a bad attempt a creating a 'new style', apparently ("Where other authors imply things, Arquette writes them in black and white") short on subtlety and long on pure exposition: "See Dick. See Jane. See Dick run."
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I agree though that an electronically transmitted virus would spread very quickly, however only to people who indulge in cybrsex.
See my journal, I write things there
I believe Stephenson is putting the finishing touches on Quicksilver, a sort-of prequel to Cryptonomicon.
William Gibson has a new novel Pattern Recognition coming out Real Soon Now.
To summarize the review:
Perhaps the reviewer doesn't realize that some people in the 18-39 demographic are still able to enjoy books that aren't written to the same spec as the latest mindless blow-em-up action flick. Some of us even read books that don't have pictures in them, on occasion. There are even a few of us who read books that have no lines matching "[Cc]yber" or "[Tt]echno".
By the way, I get REALLY PISSED OFF when I'm reading a book and notice that the author is making an obvious overture to a particular demographic instead of following the internal logic of the book. So nyah.
I'm not the only under-40 person who loves to read intelligent, well-written books, am I?
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Never use an apostrophe in front of an 's' when you are creating the plural of a singluar noun.
I first thought this story was about that fucked up cannabalistic pervert in Germany.
I've done a lot of things that most people have nightmares about, but it is all part of the job.
Isn't that what the NAZIs said?
no, the problem with the Nazis was that they didn't have nightmares about the things they did...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
...just started reading the free sample that he gives out. Definitely not going to buy the book. I think I'd describe his style as... childish. Incredibly unrefined. His character development is really poor. It honestly reads like the first efforts of an eighteen year old. (That's not to say that an eighteen year old can't write extremely well, check out Confederacy of Dunces).
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Lois Duncan edited this book - if you visit the author's website, you'll notice she's his mom. That's so sweet - mother/son bonding time with semi-pornographic novel editing. adorable.
I'm the stranger...posting to
There's a website that does it now, too!
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
From the so-called review (actually, from the introductory text, the rest of it looks like a marketing text) I guess this is Snow Crash II, the CyberSex Wars.
I think I prefer Stephenson.
It's always important for any Grammar Nazi post to have a subtle error in it.
Excuse me, but has anyone bothered to read the book? As an author myself, I would not _dare_ publish a book with spelling mistakes and even completely wrong terms. Since when is a man capable of performing a fellatio on a woman? Perhaps the author would benefit from consulting a cunning linguist :-)
Sorry, but this is really amateurish pulp. Not worth my $15. Good job the author allows you to download a sample!
IMHO, a far better read than smut.
Have you seen some of the smut on the internet nowadays?
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
Good book too, Snowcrash.
Does this new variation have the crazy skateboards and the franchises?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
You can probably find Plan 9 from Outer Space at your local video store. It involves aliens who resurrect our dead, and use the zombies to get our attention. You can find the DVD for $10 now at Amazon
There's also Bride and the Beast. Here, a woman falls into a deadly perversion also - interest in her new husband's gorilla!!! Bwwaahaahaa!
And to think, when I first saw this slashdot story, I thought it was a serious review!
Free unix account: freeshell.org
No joke! And depending upon what the cost of living is, mid 70's ain't much in NY or DC or CA...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Ok, people, repeat after me:
"A biological virus can only be introduced to one's body via some sort of transmitting vector like a mosquito, a tiny droplet of inhaled liquid, or a pecker."
"A biological virus can only be introduced to a human body if it is in a physical form capable of being introduced. This means an actual physical viral structure, in some form that can be insinutated into the body."
"Because a biological virus must be insinuated into the body in physical form to infect it, the virus cannot be transmitted electronically. Electronic transmissions can only convey concepts, not physical things (like a virus). Even if you built a cybersex suit with vibrating attachments for tickling unmentionables, the only thing you could transmit would be the control instructions for the device." (Let's say this one twice.)
FINALLY,
"Even if you built a cybersex device which directly stimulated the brain, at best you would be stimulating the parts of the brain which correlate to sensual stimuli, like vision, smell, touch, taste and hearing. Thus, you could possibly use the imagery you're transmitting to SCARE someone to death, or freak them out, or even hypnotize them, but you could not give them a virus."
Ok, gang? Let's all just swiiiiiiing our focus back to reality here. The premise of the book is dumb. I, for one, am pretty turned off every time I hear someone try to say you can catch a virus from your computer -- it makes me feel like I'm the only techie that took Biology in high school, which cannot be true (can it?). If modern American society is so techno-illiterate that they'll buy THIS kind of thing, we're fucking doomed.
Say it ain't so!
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Plus, he spells severely 'severally'.
:)
:-)
It took me a few seconds to understand that sentence. What a wordsmith
It reminded me of some particularly bad Half-Life fan fiction I read once, where the main character fell out of a window and fell several storys [sic] to the ground.
It's not the storys that kill you - it's all the chapters on the ground!
Tim
I'd quite like to know what the 'ball boy' does in a soccer match, too.
Tim
death after viewing something on the internet
Death after "viewing" sex tapes?
Brainstorm (1983)
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
imagine if you could catch a virus from your computer
well, while we're suspending disbelief, then we might as well suspend disbelief in a variety of other things.... so the parent post is moot anyway... who cares if it would spread too fast? we're talking fiction here, anyway!
Lol. It's so bad, it's actually funny. I imagine the author is someone who was told in the past that he was special and had talent... I've got news for him: he doesn't.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.