I came into Demi-Monde: WINTER with pretty much one expectation: that it would be interesting and innovative in its approach. Recommended to me by a friend who said "Its a daring mash-up of genres and tropes that kept me riveted" I mainly wanted to see if it was truly THAT original. Fully immersive virtual realities aren't anything new to me, the .hack universe is built on this principle and as other reviewers have noted there's no small cache of movies or tv shows that explore the idea either.

What Demi-Monde was to me was engaging because Rees spends a lot of effort to detail the simulated world (where soldiers train against some of the most brilliant, cruel and strategic minds from history) and repercussions it has on the real world. Your actions, or lack of actions, in the Demi-Monde could have real world consequences to your character and it was intriguing to watch as some people just...ignored that. War Games taken to a new level, soldiers had to think outside the box (and their training) to survive and not everyone is up to that task.

The book is however very very long. Rees had quite a bit of information to build into the plot in order to make the world seem real and plausible, but it became information overload. Much of the military stuff went over my head and that's not even touching on the politics, beliefs and philosophies of 'Demi-Mondians' (basically obsessive fans). The Demi-Mondians take LARP'ers, D&D geeks and MMORPG enthusiasts to a whole new level--and sometimes that level was downright creepifying.

While I enjoyed the concept and kept reading to see what new twist Rees tossed into the pot, in the end this book wouldn't be a 'keeper' for me. My attention strayed and I often turned to shorter books that held my attention much better. ( )

The mistake I did in start reading this book (apart from reading it at all) was when I assumed it would be an actionpacked read with a spunky heroine as the main character.

Big mistake. It might superficially be about that yet its not that at all.

I felt a bit like Alice falling into a world where everything was nonsensical and bizarre and eventually flat out crazy (and with an undecurrent of racism) And with 522 pages this brick of a book has a lot of time to play with those themes.

There is just too much going on and more and more characters introduced
.not to mention the villains who are all taken from history and considered EVIL,and not only the nazi but other whose "evilness could be up for debate (Aleister Crowley,Lucrezia Borgia)

AlSo thIs kiNd of wRiting for gROups and places and movements and beliefs and tHINgs and and and-

That last bit was to simulate (pun intended) how the writing came across. There are better books out there and I hope I can soon forget this one. ( )

Thank goodness that's over.

The Demi-Monde is a computer simulation modelled on real life and history (Matrix-style, full immersion), used for training purposes. As a starting premise, it's a minefield. When you want to condense the world into microcosm and rejig it, the question isn't whether it will be problematic, it's how and to what degree. Now, as rendered in the book, I found it appalling Euro-centric. There are five sectors, and three of them are Euro (Anglo, Russian/Slav, and Romantic) which leaves the other two being "Asian and stuff" and "African and Muslim and stuff", and these also being the two with skewed gender dynamics. Given that the purported objective of the simulation is to train US forces in low-intensity conflict scenarios - which usually do not occur in Europe - this seems a ridiculous set-up. (On the other hand, would setting it up in any other way provide dangerous options of "only the whites are good"? He avoids that problem neatly by having Nazis. Nazis are always as evil as it gets! No wuckers!)

But there were so many things about the way the simulation was set up that made little to no sense. The selection of historical personalities was occasionally interesting, but mostly just baffling. (What on earth was Aleister Crowley doing there? He deserves, in my mind, neither such praise nor such censure; I may have, in ranting about this, referred to him as the Paris Hilton of Victorian esoteria.) There are many detail flaws in the construction of the world - the locals don't bleed, but they bruise; trees can't grow except when we need them for military purposes; the language involves ongoing ridiculous references to things that don't and have never existed in the simulation.

Let's take a moment to fully appreciate the compound irritation offered in those ridiculous reference by the auThor's flagRant misUse of his Shift keY. YOU ARE NOT CLEVER, SONNY.

But the big problem of the book is in the lack of grace in its telling. It starts terribly slowly, "establishing" the simulation nature of things before plunging in (at which point things pick up considerably). I use the quotemarks because very little of actual substance is established about the simulation itself. We learn bugger all of the technical details, which enables the author to handwave such things as the fact that they can jack a character in, but seem unable to jack her out again (even in the Matrix, you could exit through the entry door), not to mention why programming can't solve the problem. IT'S A COMPUTER UNDER YOUR CONTROL.

Pacing and "but why?" continue to plague the story. Major changes in character direction occur over the space of twelve hours, huge action sequences are given the one-paragraph summary ("and then they took the barricade") and big character emotional points are crammed into the last few lines before the end of a chapter, occasionally feeling like they needed to fit it in so they didn't have to go over the page and interrupt the typeset. The writing itself has all the elevation of a kid lying across the coffee table pretending to be Superman, and the main character kept forgetting her reason for being there at all. Not to mention the author's abhorrent tendency to solve everything with her deus ex striptease; in fact, her skin seems to exert such a hypnotic tendency on everyone in the Demi-Monde that I assume if she was naked, she'd crash the server.

Conceptually, I feel like there's a lot of interesting going on here, but the execution is so cack-handed I couldn't recommend it to anyone. ( )

The Demi-Monde: Winter: Book I of the Demi-Monde Oh The Demi Monde: Winter, what do I say about you first? It's pretty obvious straight away that this is a very lengthy read. I'm a fan of Science Fiction and therefore I'm used to reading books that border on tomes. Still, I'm certain that many people are going to be scared off immediately by the hefty weight of this book. At 522 pages, this is definitely not a light read.
 
That being said, the book actually starts out very well. From the first page the reader is thrown into a skewed world that mirrors our own, but is infinitely more terrifying. Imagine a place where the worst villains the most reviled of historical figures, make their home. A land where racism and sexism run rampant. All created by the government to fit into a training simulation for soldiers. The most advanced simulation ever seen, with the power to think for itself. Sound scary? Ella Thomas thinks so too, and yet she's headed in.
 
Now the real problem I found with this book was that Rod Rees was too ambitious. I know this sounds odd, but he packs so many different tropes into this story that after a while it becomes difficult to follow. I loved Ella. I loved everything about her intelligent schemes and daring escapes. Honestly, if the book had just followed her I would have been just fine. However there are social classes to remember, slang terms for different races, city names, wars, dates, and endless amounts of other information. If I was wondering why this book was so long, I found my answer.
 
The fact is, there are a lot of great things in this book. Wonderful characters, twists and turns. It just all happened to be buried under a lot of information that felt like it didn't need to be there. I skimmed a lot of this story if I'm being honest. Fact is, the parts I read still made up a whole story that was amazing. So now you see why my rating is where it is. Kudos to Rod Rees for taking on such an ambitious project, but perhaps the next book should have a little less in the info-dump department so the page count goes down. ( )

Super fucking fantastic. Cannot wait for the next one to come out. Damn living in America where I have to wait like 2 years for it. ( )