Synopses & Reviews
"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 secondnovel 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.
Synopsis
In the tradition of Neal Stephenson's bestselling modern classic Snow Crash, Alexander Besher offers a peek at the deadlier side of the Internet revolution in a novel that is required reading for all cybernauts and science-fiction buffs.
"A dizzyingly imaginative tale of virtual reality and cybernetic espionage...one hell of a ride for readers who have the tenacity to grab hold of the hurtling narrative and let it take them where it will", proclaimed the San Francisco Chronicle of Alexander Besher's first novel, Rim. Now this futuristic, cutting-edge thriller picks up where his critically acclaimed debut left off.
Set in the year 2032, this breathlessly paced novel unveils a world caught in a new Cold War -- an ideological rivalry between competing virtual reality operating systems.
When someone creates a virus called Mir, real life and virtual life suddenly become inextricably tangled. Mir is an intelligent, living virus that isn't satisfied with crippling the Net, destroying virtual personalities, and handicapping the world's on-line commerce. Mir has been turned loose onto the world in the form of living tattoos -- and it is now killing in real time, in real life.
Like Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, Besher has an uncanny knack for predicting the on-line future. His hardcover debut is sure to thrill the many fans of Rim, for whom Besher has become a revered cult figure.