Killobyte

I had a lot of fun. The characters were very strange.

First, the woman with Type 1 Diabetes who was still really good friends with her ex that dumped her because "his grandmother had to do the needles and he just couldn't deal." She falls in love with a cop who got ran over by a dude who's exgirlfriend was paying him in sex for protecting her from said boyfriend (what??). Anyway they fall in love in VR after being attacked by a "Phreak" aka a hacker aka a sad 14 year old boy. This Phreak is the son of a snake cultist who died from a snake bite. etc.

This book was really silly.

I enjoyed the lighthearted tone and easy to read style of this book, it made for a quick and easy read. In the end though, it was a bit too quick and too easy to make it all that enjoyable.

As a result, the few areas the authour put a lot of focus on, like the female lead's medical issues, and the religious factions in one of the settings ended up sticking out like sore thumbs.

If you could make yourself stop giggling every time the modem was running up user's phone bills and preventing phone calls from going through, the rest of the computer tech was left fuzzy enough it actually stands up ok for the first half of the book. Then you run face first into the villain of the piece and as a computer tech, the premise setting up the rest of show more the book quickly went from funny to absurd.

I held my nose and still managed to enjoy parts of it, then was let down again by the ending.

Why oh why did the Princess end up fainting and letting her knight rescue her? Couldn't we just once, with a set up like that let the female character being the hero instead of the literally fainting love sick teenager?

The less technical you are, and the less you expect of it, the more you might enjoy it.

Not all bad, a 2-1/2 for me. show less

I had a lot of fun. The characters were very strange.

First, the woman with Type 1 Diabetes who was still really good friends with her ex that dumped her because "his grandmother had to do the needles and he just couldn't deal." She falls in love with a cop who got ran over by a dude who's exgirlfriend was paying him in sex for protecting her from said boyfriend (what??). Anyway they fall in love in VR after being attacked by a "Phreak" aka a hacker aka a sad 14 year old boy. This Phreak is the son of a snake cultist who died from a snake bite. etc.

This book was really silly.

Read this on recommendation from a friend. He read it so many times as a kid the cover fell off his copy. Had I read this for the first time as a kid, I probably would have done the same. It's a good read. Enough adventure to keep you interested, but scant enough on details to get bogged down in technology. Worth the read.

With the advent of widespread online multi-player games like World of Warcraft and Everquest, this novel really seems ahead of its time. Especially when you consider that Anthony had the idea to write this novel in 1981. Granted, some old technology is involved (i.e. dial-up modems) but you can't really fault the author for referencing the knowable communication medium at the time.

Anthony also gives us a couple of different lessons:

1. Diabetes, of which I was woefully ignorant of the details. Yeah, I've heard the term "blood sugar" used before, but I never really knew what it meant because it doesn't concern me. Anthony has given me an amount of sympathy to those that suffer from this disease, especially Type 1.

2. Lebanon during a time show more of civil war. You gain a good baseline of knowledge on the different state and non-state actors involved. Still very relevant to current times.

If you're a fan of video games and Piers Anthony, despite a few characterization flaws, you'll definitely enjoy reading this. show less

I liked this as a teenager, but this time, I couldn't get 50 pages in. The writing is awkward and boring, and the characterization is worse.

I love the concept of being able to physically enter a game. I read this before games such as WOW even existed, and multi-player strategy games were very limited. It was fun to imagine how much farther such things could go.