Secret Realms
Language: English
Published by Tor Books, 1998
- Hardcover
- Used
Seller: Wonder Book, Frederick, MD, U.S.A.Wonder Book
AbeBooks seller since November 1, 1997
Condition: Used - Very good
£ 5.32
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Add to basketItem description from seller
Very Good condition. Very Good dust jacket. A copy that may have a few cosmetic defects. May also contain light spine creasing or a few markings such as an owner's name, short gifter's inscription or light stamp.
Seller Inventory # P07A-03272
- Title
- Secret Realms
- Author
- Cool, Tom
- Publisher
- Tor Books
- Publication year
- 1998
- Condition
- Very Good
- Dust jacket
- Dust Jacket Included
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0312864175
- ISBN 13
- 9780312864170
But as war breaks out in the real world between Japan and China, the puppet masters who control their lives tighten the leash: their virtual scenarios become maps of reality, and their strategies are acted out by real battle units. But Cat, Trickster, Dreamer, Snake, and the others don't know it. All they have ever known is the endless settings of the virtual world.
And then one day they discover the real world, their bodies held prisoner in a secret military facility on an island in the Pacific. They decide to reclaim themselves and enter the real world, the real war. And the first thing they discover is pain.
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
From the Author
When David Hartwell sent me Tom Cool's SECRET REALMS, the accompanying note said the novel reminded him "of Roger Zelazny's work, archetypal heroic SF adventure: clever, fast-paced, with serious underpinnings. And we all sure could use another writer like Zelazny." He may even be right.
SECRET REALMS is indeed a crackerjack. At the start, it seems quite cryptic. Characters Trickster, Cat, Snake, Dreamer, and more are being put through exercises that look a lot like video games. Lots of shoot-'em-up-bang-bang and movement to a new level if you survive this one, complicated by the knowledge that this is the only world you know, and you may or may not be just a software entity. Before long, Cool reveals that the cyber characters' world is indeed a cyberworld. The Chinese have been hooked infants' brains into a super-computer complex and grown them into maturity in an artificial reality designed to foster the skills of body, mind, and data manipulation essential! to modern war.
And these fifteen boys and girls are GOOD--fast and strong and smart. Perhaps too smart--for Trickster and Dreamer have intuited the existence of an outside world, a larger world, of which theirs is but a subset or realm (Dreamer thinks the outside world may also be a realm of something larger). And when their masters finally decide it is time to use them in an all-out war against Japan and let them interact with that outer world, they begin to see other options than their masters would like--if they but knew. Is war really necessary? If you could save millions or billions by sacrificing a few thousand, would you do it? Is such a question as moot as one might think for characters who falsify orders to send an American aircraft carrier into harm's way, destroy fifty heavily armed Japanese commandos, and...? Well, they're not invulnerable. But they do have immense powers by ordinary standards, they do make hash of the opposition, and they do it all for a good c! ause. This makes Cool's yarn a very satisfying adventure.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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