Besher, Alexander

Mir: A Novel of Virtual Reality

Ultimately a love story--or what Alexander Besher calls more accurately a love triangle between a boy, a girl, and her tattoo--Mir manages to be both serious and silly cyberpunk. This tense, believable thriller still manages to make "robotics"/"raw buttocks" jokes. Trevor Gobi, the son of Rim's protagonist Frank Gobi, is tracking down Mir, a devastating virus that has infected his girlfriend Nelly (through her sentient tattoo Sinbad) and that threatens to crash both the virtual and "real" world. Not quite the tight read Rim was, Mir still succeeds thanks to the sheer volume of Besher's imagination. --Paul Hughes

Mir. The Russian word for "peace," for "one world." Mir 3.0 is the code name for a piece of neural software that can change the world. And it's escaped carrying a virus that is hell-bent on doing just that.

The year is 2036 and the world is in the grip of a new cold war. The Berlin Wall is back up and concentration camps have been recreated. It is an eerily familiar conflict with a chilling new twist -- this is a battle for control of cyberspace and the Wall and the camps are both of the virtual variety. It's a time when epidermal programming is the cutting-edge fetish among the fringe dwellers of the hacker underworld. These epidermal programs are sentient tattoos that can travel on-line and perform tasks for their owners on the Net. They can even move from body to body in forbidden techno-pagan rituals.

Now the Mir virus is on the loose, traveling as a passenger on the tattoos. Like the tattoos, Mir can migrate from consciousness to consciousness, from body to body, from individuals to entire nations, both off-line and on-line. No one, nothing, is safe in its deadly path.

Trevor Gobi, son of the legendary virtual reality investigator Frank Gobi, is on the trail of Mir. His girlfriend Nelly has become infected through a tattoo, a tattoo that assumes a phantasmic form of its own as it incubates on her body. as it threatens her very existence -- and the entire World Wide Net.

Mir is the second novel in the Rim Trilogy. The first, Rim, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and described as "a book destined to become a classic" by Paul Saffo, director of the Institute of the Future. National Public Radio's Moira Gunn called it "incredibly compelling with its mix of technology and metaphysics, human consciousness, and virtual reality."

In Mir, Besher presents a startlingly complete and daunting vision of a future where the on-line, virtual life has become fully as real and crucial to everyone's survival as mundane reality. It is a wildly imaginative, frighteningly believable thriller that is guaranteed to join Neuromancer and Snow Crash as defining paradigms of the cyberfuture.

RIM

CHI

Cyberpunk glitz and biotechnology blend with warped Eastern mysticism in Alexander Besher's loosely linked Rim series. This began with Rim, set in 2027, and continued with Mir--in which one bizarre invention was sentient tattoos. By the time of Chi it's 2038 and the world is even weirder. Vast bootlegging operations deal in chi, a life-force energy that can be technomagically sucked from unwilling victims and used to give rich addicts enhanced intelligence, great sex, and even "short-time immortality." Meanwhile, hackers break into nature's equivalent of the Internet, whose central node is a tree in Indonesia that channels telepathic e-mail to apes and others--which includes, of course, "win a million bananas" spam messages. Orangutans are surgically and genetically remodelled into surrogate children for an increasingly infertile world: the human/ape species barrier is crumbling. A mysterious and decidedly offbeat global spiritual transformation is threatened. Besher mixes surreal comedy, a spice of gruesomeness, and enough weird sf ideas for half a dozen books. (Under-shell deodorant for snails? Good grief.) The plot is a wild roller-coaster ride that ends with several loose threads and a shaggy-dog punchline. Great fun, but Chi promises slightly more than it delivers. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk

It is the year 2038 and the world of cyberspace is being manipulated exclusively for personal gain. Wing Fat, the head of a Southeast Asian biotech drug cartel, is siphoning off vital chi essence from enslaved humans held on plantations in the former Golden Triangle. Bootleg chi products -- in increasingly high demand -- are flooding the world's most violent black markets, offering global consumers everything they have always craved; superenhanced intelligence, greater creativity, heightened sexual powers, multimedia implants, and even "short-term immortality."

If you can afford it, you can have it. But even the 650-pound chi godfather Wing Fat, who is having an illicit affair with his sentient elevator, can't have everything. It is up to Frank and Trevor Gobi, the father-and-son team of virtual, reality investigators, to make sure of that.

In Chi, the third novel of the critically acclaimed Rim series, Alexander Besher takes the reader on an incredible futuristic journey to a fascinating world only the deep recesses of Besher's mind can acutely portray. By following the adventures and exploits of Frank and Trevor Gobi, and their quest to undermine Wing Fat's powerful chi empire, the reader is introduced to the bizarre Southeast Asian world of biotech primates who are half-human and half-orangutan and the bloodthirsty pirates who risk life and limb to smuggle the mutants out of the wild so they can be assimilated into the human world. By uncovering a peculiar tragedy involving a pair of Romeo and Juliet-like primates, the Gobis are led deeper and deeper into the evil empire of Wing Fat until they finally come face to face with the terrifying, gripping truth. Suspenseful and dramatic at every twist and turn, Chi is the perfect final installment to the celebrated Rim series. Besher's first two books, Rim and Mir, were hailed as pioneers in the world of contemporary science fiction, and Chi is the logical culmination to those works.

Wildly imaginative, wickedly funny, and devilishly suspenseful, Chi is a wonderfully crafted, page-turning futuristic thriller. A bold and daring novel, Chi ups the ante on Besher's unique brand of visionary mayhem and takes the reader on a fantastical ride to a world no one has ever seen before.

Rim - Una Novela de La Realidad Virtual