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The Escapist
The Escapist is set in an indeterminate future. Space travel seems to exist, but most of the action takes place on Earth. And there's plenty of action, too. From page one, the book races along with scarcely a pause for breath, and by the time you've finished you've been around the world, met numerous bizarre competing factions, and uncovered the plot behind the mysterious Mind Invasions. The storyline takes in locations as far afield as Egypt, Malaysia, Israel, Las Vegas, New York, and London. It almost seems like a travelogue of all the places the author has been in his life, except seen through a warped lens of cyberpunk fiction.
In fact, the story seems almost arbitrary, like it was written as a stream of consciousness. Think Beat Generation, but penned by a Jack Kerouac who's fascinated by computers rather than drugs, jazz and driving. Bentley Dean is carried along by the increasingly frantic stream of events, each one hitting him sideways. All is revealed at the end, but you still get the feeling that many situations occur with no rhyme or reason -- a bit like real life, only with more explosions.
The ideas about future technology in The Escapist can vary from insightful to mundane. The central theme of cryogenic sabbaticals is rather amusing, though. These could be described as "holidays on ice." And though this is clearly a cyberpunk novel, not much of it actually takes place in cyberspace --that's more of a recurring theme in the background. Most of the action occurs in the flesh. This is maybe a good thing, as the novel's description of using virtual reality to explore the human mind is a bit 20th century, perhaps as a deliberate lampoon of how dated films like The Lawnmower Man seem today.
But that doesn't really matter. Most of the time, this is a very funny book. It's full of one-liners which take the present day and twist it to its logical extremes, so you can see just how ridiculous it is. The moon, with its low gravity, becomes a refuge for the overweight. Pandas are saved from extinction by being genetically re-engineered to like eating hamburgers. A strip club is named after Pee-Wee Herman. Bentley buys a fashionable suit made of paper, only to find it too noisy for creeping around at night.
Some of these ideas will have you laughing out loud, although a few of the gags are very much for the geeks in the audience, like the Windows Bar and Grill which takes three attempts to get your order right. There are also plenty of embedded cultural references for film buffs to spot, including HAL, Yoda and even James Bond quotations. You cant help feeling at times that the plot is just there to serve the jokes.
But the book also has a serious side. There's a deeper theme about artificial intelligence, and each chapter is headed by a quasi-philosophical statement. Some of these will really get you thinking, and some are deliberately silly, just to catch you out. If you're interested in the whole question of whether or not computers could ever think like us, and what that would mean, theres food for thought here, hidden among the humour. The Escapist is a book which just doesn't stop hitting you with idea after idea, some of them serious and some intended entirely for darkly comic relief.
The Escapist's main fault is just this -- it tries to do too much in too few pages. It's so fast that at times you have trouble keeping up, and sometimes you wish the characters would just slow down and admire the scenery. And if you need a truly sympathetic character to relate to in your novels, you might find Bentley Dean is just too mean. He's also too much like a cross between James Bond and Kevin Mitnick. But if you have a perverse streak, and a penchant for satire, you'll like The Escapist. You may even wish it was a bit longer.
As well as being available in printed form, The Escapist can also be bought as a PDF direct from the website. And since the novel is published under a Creative Commons license, once you've got hold of one of these PDFs, you can share it around and print it out as much as you like. The cover art is well worth seeing on a real book, though -- it has an evocative mystery all of its own.
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"antihero" == "not remarkable", "not heroic".
An antihero would be a milquetoast everyman who doesn't do heroic things, or who has every good thing he tries to do turn out badly.
Mindplayers by Cadigan (sort of)
Islands in the Net by Sterling
Holy Fire by Sterling
Burning Chrome (short story) by Gibson
Cyberpunk (short story) by Bruce Bethke
City Come A Walkin' by John Shirley (if by "cyberspace" you mean a proto-network comprised of anthropomorphised city-AIs, and if by "hacking" you mean said city-AIs messing around with the real world via this network)
Eclipse trilogy by John Shirley (a lot of dystopian, but a fair amount of "hacking" and man-machine interfaces, which might interest you)
That's all I've got for now.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling might be what you are looking for.
It's just a nomenclature problem.
He said "...a hacker with a cold-blooded killing streak", but he meant "...a sysadmin with a cold-blooded killing streak", which is, of course, perfectly understandable and quite common.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
You didn't mention it, have you checked out Altered Carbon and Broken Angels? Highly recommended.
Here's the picture of the cover. Not very mysterious or evocative in my opinion, but what do I know about high art.
I don't think it's the buzz words so much as the writing. A good edit would have helped that paragraph.
In the first sentence, the narrator knows what is "going down," but in the third he does not. The second sentence is a mess. Is Rodriguez right there in the room dialing up the narrator's pager? And by the fourth sentence, Rodriguez has been demoted from token minority programmer to "nobody." Then in the fifth sentence, "Pocket Assistant" confusingly turns into "Phoenix handheld." Presumably, back in sentence two, he meant "pocket assistant" and not "Pocket Assistant."
This book, The Escapist was self-published here. This site actually has an interview w/ the author (or hack whichever you prefer). Here are a few choice tidbits from the interview. My comments are added in italics
/.?
...send me some money...viral marketing ...
...I've had one review on a popular computing news website as well so far. Oh really, and where would you find editors of a popular computing news website lazy enough to publish said review... oh... sorry, silly question
What is the Escapist about?
It's an epic, picaresque tale, which I've somehow managed to squeeze into 168 pages. which the author later revealed took him 13 years to write... roughly 13 pages per year on the average.
Why did you decide to self publish your book?
I had tried sending The Escapist to a few agents. I'm sure if I'd carpet bombed all the relevant agencies I would eventually have found representation and some form of publishing deal. Sure you would have... well considering what they publish... you acutally might have But it could have taken ages, and I was confident my book was good enough for prime time. By prime time... you mean posting your own review on
You've taken a Creative Commons license. Why did you do that?
How are you going to market your book?
Well, I hope someone likes it. Read the PDF, burn a copy... to a CD or otherwise... and send this guy some money, but not enough to make him think about writing a follow up.
I'll second that recommendation. If you're looking for a seminal "future noir" detective/cyberpunk novel, look no further than 'Altered Carbon' by Richard Morgan. It's about an ex-military private detective who is released from prison and hired by a rich man to find out who killed him and why. (A key feature of the series is that in this future, most people have their consciousness backed up to an implanted storage device, and it can be restored into any other body.)
'Broken Angels', the sequel, borrows the main character from Altered Carbon, but little else. It's primarily a future war novel where the main character and his small group face off against military and corporate interests during a planetary civil war. Both novels contain plenty of violent and sexual content.
There's a third book in the series called 'Woken Furies', just recently released.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Eventually (probably in a few decades) the new meaning comic books invented for "anti-hero" may have become prevalent enough that is becomes accepted as a standard definition. Currently it only exists in subculture.
If you want to prove I'm wrong, please site an actual academic source.
For Cadigan, if you can find them, I rather enjoyed Fools as well as Synners. Her short story collection, Patterns, has some gems, and Tea From an Empty Cup and Dervish is Digital are also worth reading, although I do enjoy her earlier work more.
FWIW, she did the novelization of the Lost In Space movie as well, but I've not read it.
Well, if you check his email address, you'll see that the domain name is the publisher's domain name (tzero.demon.co.uk). So, yeah, pretty much.
This tough-but-fair reviewer apparently shares an e-mail address with the fabulous novelist James Morris, widely hailed author of The Escapist. I'm sure this is merely a coincidence and not the result of someone so completely lame that he had to review his own book in order to get anyone to say something positive about it.
The reviewer *is* the author ... it's just sad, isn't it?
Antihero: A protagonist who lacks one or more of the conventional qualities attributed to a hero. Instead of being dignified, brave, idealistic, or purposeful, the antihero may be cowardly, self-interested, alienated, or weak. Although instances of the antihero are sprinkled throughout literature since ancient times -- for instance, Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) and Byron's Don Juan (1819-24) -- the antihero in the current sense is essentially a twentieth-century character. Their antiheroism tends to reflect the spiritual or social afflictions of modern man and woman -- atheism, loneliness, mistrust of authority, disillusionment with Western ideals. Posing a satiric or frank contrast to traditional portrayals of idealized heroes and heroines, antiheroes are figures of moral and psychological waywardness, and also of social and ethical criticism. Their oppositional nature stems not simply from within, but from the interaction of self and society; hence their failings point to themselves and to the worlds they inhabit. Modern examples range from Arthur Miller's Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1949) to the sex-crazed Jewish adolescent in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969).
From "Handbook of Literary Terms: Literature, Language, Theory." X.J. Kennedy et al. 2005.