David Louis Edelman

The rather surprising conclusion to the trilogy is high on moral quandary and low on all-out action or boardroom shenanigans or Natschian trickery and manipulation. Oh it's there all right. We have an all-out battle, we have Natch on a space habitat stamping out a drug just to see what happens, we have clever political maneuvers between the Unconnected, the fiiefcorp and the Committee factions, but these are all preamble to a colossal and terrible choice thrust on Natch by Margaret Surina, show more and even of he has made a long and arduous journey from the selfish slimebag of book one to the dispassionate saint of book three, how can he possibly know which is the correct choice to make?

A clever, moving ending to an exciting and highly readable trilogy that genuinely managed to make the stuff of high finance into the stuff of cheap thrills, and then, in the end, maybe they weren't so cheap after all. show less

There’s nothing like a slick, smart, well-written science fiction thriller to set the mind buzzing and racing with strange new ideas and brilliant, imaginative, logical leaps into the future. The reader is plunged into a world that is utterly strange and yet oddly familiar, as the old human passions and drives and desires play their old games in this future funhouse.

The future funhouse of Infoquake, gives us a world where technology is literally built into people, turning them into show more walking iPhones, and the big business is in creating, developing and selling apps for a populace hungry for novelty and innovation. Fiefcorps compete savagely for their share of the market, and one of the youngest, hungriest and most devious of these fiefcorps is run by a supremely ambitious young man called Natch, along with his old friend Horvil, an engineer, and an analyst called Jara, who finds her conscience under severe strain thanks to some of Natch’s more underhanded strategies. Their exploits bring them to the attention of Margaret Surina, descendant of one of the genuises who helped create the technology that shaped the world. Rumour has it that she may be set to reshape the world again with a mysterious new technology called Multireal.

With enemies and rivals closing in on all sides, Surina convinces Natch to prepare and develop Multireal for demonstration and release in only a few days. But potentially lethal rivals and a crushing deadline are only minor problems compared to the biggest of all: nobody seems to know what Multireal is.

At heart, Infioquake is a old school corporate thriller full of cut-throat boardroom poilitics, maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, back-stabbing and betrayal, all married to a vividly realised world full of wild technological marvels. It’s an adrenaline-fueled ride from start to finish as Neetch and friends fight to stay alive and stay on top. show less

I read (and sort of liked) part one of this trilogy, Infoquake. Got about 100 pages into MultiReal and thought, you know, there's really not enough here for three books. And I really don't want to be supporting that marketing ploy when it seems that's what it is: a ploy. There are plenty of singleton books out there worth buying and supporting, as well as good series. But this just seems like marketing to me. The story reminded me very much of the cyberpunk books of years back, especially show more "Snow Crash," which just celebrated it's 20th anniversary. There's not much here, in fact, that's original or interesting, or NEW. Many trite, worn-out cliches you've seen a zillion times elsewhere, such as the girl with the mad crush on our hero, who is a young Ender-like genius-rebel fighting against the Powers That Be, who are all bad, virtual reality, nanobots, etc. The prose reads like a graphic novel, with no depth. The dialogue is painful. And as another reviewer here notes, the eponymous tech MultiReal is neither believable nor is it something people would be killing each other over, in my opinion. If there was a real, living, breathing cut-throat business world being portrayed here, where the battlefields are in the boardrooms, well, yeah, maybe then. But the fact is that while the book(s) is nearly 1500 pages long, all told, we never see the world of the future, the people in it, what it's like to live in the world of this future. Compare to "River of Gods" by Ian McDonald, for instance. Now there's a fully-imagined future, extrapolated from our present in a very convincing way, peopled by real characters. MultiReal, on the other hand, was not worth reading. show less

Every once in a great while I run across an author who has imagined a world so vivid and complete that I feel as if it actually exists. When that world is set hundreds of years in the future, this feat of creation is even more astounding.

Geosynchron, the final piece of David Edelman's Jump 225 Trilogy, completes the story of entrepreneur Natch, convincingly portraying his evolution from self-centered businessman to socially-conscious guardian of MultiReal. Infected with life-threatening show more black code and on the run from his nemesis Brone as well two executives vying for control of the Government, Natch must choose between two paths, each with dire consequences for the welfare of the human race.

As with its predecessors, this novel features intense action sequences, mentally-stimulating political maneuvering, and interesting thematic material. Here, the possible unification of the connectibles (the majority of the population who fully embrace the fusion of their bodies with software that regulats their bodily functions and connects them to the Datasea) and the unconnectibles (a minority group who have chosen to remain in a more-or-less natural state), and the disparate viewpoints they embrace, form a central motif.

If humans are on an inevitable path towards perfection, is it truly possible to destroy a technology that has the possibility to improve the human condition (but with alarming collateral consequences) or can we only hope to come up with a way to restrict its proliferation until adequate controls are in place? This is not only Natch's dilemma, but the dilemma our society faces as we stand on the brink of technologies that could alter the course of human evolution.

The Jump 225 Trilogy, for me, deserves not only a wide readership but also recognition as one of the most important sci-fi works of our time. show less