The story starts with a Harvard psychology professor being recruited by an eccentric multibillionaire genius to come to the advanced technological research base on his private island and examine his secret artificially intelligent supercomputer, which is showing signs of depression, or multiple personalities, or something. So right away, you can see that this book is not exactly free of cliche. And for something that dares to use the word "thriller" in the subtitle, it's extremely dull and talky. There is some action at the end -- which I actually found much less interesting than the talkiness -- but for most of the book, the only point seems to be, "Hey, look at this nifty technology!" Admittedly, the technology is pretty nifty. But although the practical applications depicted in the book are ridiculously implausible for the near future, the ideas are all pretty familiar, and I'm fairly sure that I would have found them just as much so in 1996, when the novel was published. Which puts me far ahead of the protagonist, who is so consistently freaked out about absolutely everything that it seems as if she's never watched a science fiction movie or read a speculative magazine article. Or learned anything from her experiences earlier in the story. Come to think of it, I don't believe there's a whole lot of evidence of her supposed expertise in psychology, either.

Despite its flaws, I actually found this surprisingly readable, in a no-real-emotional-investment-required, pick-it-up-and-put-it-down-over-a-busy-holiday way, for the first 250 pages or so. But by about halfway through, I was becoming increasingly bored with its ridiculously extended attempts to build up some supposed big, dark secret. (Which, come to think of it, was probably a good thing, because the secret, when it's finally "explained" at the end, is incredibly, incredibly lame.) By the last 100 pages or so, which is when the theoretically exciting action stuff is happening, I was so bored that I stopped paying much attention to the plot, and just spent my time thinking about how much I'd like to smack the main characters for being deeply annoying and for wasting my time.

Sigh. ( )

Not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, not a great book by any stretch either. The book is basically a fun filled skip through the fields of new technology and computing. During this romp we find some suspense, thrills, and a bit o’ mystery for good measure. But, in the end, it is a book that is fun to move through.

While it’s not going to win any awards for the greatest sci-fi book written, it is an enjoyable read, especially if you are into computers. Being a programmer I was interested in much of the talk of neural network programming in the book. Being a CAVE (room sized virtual reality environment) developer myself, I was also quite interested in the VR environments in the book and the tale delivered in both of these areas with descriptions that were more realistic and believable than not. The descriptions of the environments were quite close to current CAVE setups except for a stretch of somewhat fantastic haptic devices and the fully immersive video environment mapping—explained by the use of far more computing power than we have today.

For being true to the technology—which is a rare treat in the movie-script-gone-bad world of sci-fi novels these days—I whole heartedly recommend this book for your reading pleasure. ( )