BKCHMERA.RVW 940104 Random House/Ballantine 101 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10003 or 201 E. 50th St., 31st Floor New York, NY 10022 212-751-2600 800-733-3000 800-726-0600 "Chimera", Rosenblum, 1993, 0-345-38528-4, US$4.99/CDN$5.99 Why the chimera, in mythology, should be considered more fantastic than, say, the basilisk or griffin, I do not know. Nonetheless, it has now come down to us as a synonym for a fantastic mythological or illusory creature or object. The last is the obvious referent for the title here; the book deals, to a major extent, with virtual reality (VR). Presumably the world of Chimera is the not-too-distant future. It is a very unappealing world. For the most part, a massively unemployed population languishes in welfare-supported urban areas, provided with substandard food, education and medical care. Our introduction to this world is in the Antarctic, where a number of the wealthy elite have built an enclave under Mount Erebus. Here they fill their homes with gardens, deserts and forests crafted for them by virtual reality artists. Most business and even social contact is conducted via virtual reality. People create Selves which are usually edited versions of their own bodies, but which can also be selected or even created. Most business is, of course, carried out through telecommunications media. Although the action moves reasonably fast, the introduction of characters is uneven. We know, early on, from standard foreshadowing, that Anya and Serafina are important. For a very large chunk of the book, however, we learn nothing more. They are as mysterious to the reader in mid-book as they are to you, reading this now. Frustrating, isn't it? (Rosenblum also "cheats": having built herself into a series of technical paradoxes that she cannot resolve, she resorts to magic. And then abandons it.) The central character is not, initially, very sympathetic. Her major characteristics are ambition, greed and anger. There is an admirable, but undeveloped, VR artist. One of the most interesting characters is the artist's partner/technician. He is the prototypical hacker: careless of consequence, intellectually curious and vain about his technical abilities. Rosenblum is an obvious subscriber to the "hacker as junkie" theory, although she has tried to design a class of drugs, "kickers", that are an aid to VR alone. (Such a "technical" drug would likely have an extremely limited market.) A comment by one "hacker wannabe" character is interesting. She is a cyberpunk, although not in the Gibsonian sense. Running with a street gang by day (the punk side), she runs with net hackers in the Net virtual worlds by night. Asked about the attraction, she states that on the Net she is a "someone", and that it was she who made herself a someone on the Net. This is quite consistent with the behaviour that we see from a number of young people through their first few years on the nets (and, to tell the truth, from many newcomers regardless of age). On the net you are judged solely by input, since background often cannot be determined. However, a great many who think they have made a name for themselves overestimate their own importance. Many such leave the net, or specific discussions, when they find that their exhortations are not considered gospel by everyone. The technical details are startling both in their fidelity and their dissonance. Rosenblum has a nice feel for the social and cultural activities of the Internet--while tying it to a very costly network system. Access to market information, which most companies would be eager to provide for free, is seen as a major cost, while the cost of bandwidth for transmission of the enormous volumes of information that virtual reality would require is not considered at all. The person who passed this along for me to review had gotten a third of the way into it and still didn't understand it. I suspect there are a few different factors at work here. Rosenblum uses the currently popular technique of "creating" a different world by liberally strewing the text with made-up jargon. She has also, however, used two very powerful emerging technologies. Some of the concepts are so thoroughly a part of the story that those unfamiliar with the reality may sometimes find themselves struggling to understand something that is inherently impossible. For example, our initial introduction to Rosenblum's brand of VR has a user exiting and entering by taking off and putting on lenses and gloves. To those who have studied the field, this obviously refers to an updated version of virtual reality helmets with visual displays and "power gloves" which allow the program to sense the user's movements. A reaction to what could only be a tactile stimulus is explained, several pages later, by "skinthins," which must be a whole body tactile unit. (This follows, however, some passages in which skinthins could very well be protective clothing against the elements. And I seriously doubt that even tactile stimulus could make one oblivious to the fact that one's chair had fallen over backwards.) The purpose and structure of these pieces of hardware, however, would not necessarily be immediately obvious to all readers. In the same way, the creation of doors in walls and walking through into a completely different environment is a fairly obvious analogy to anyone who has done a terminal session on a Mac into a UNIX system and then remote login onto an IBM mainframe. Otherwise, one could be forgiven for wondering what was going on. This is not to say that Internauts will be entirely comfortable here either. Rosenblum's jargon is iconoclastic. Nodes are people rather than computers. The Net is not the anarchistic but accessible Internet that we know, it is, rather, a collection of paranoid, pay-per-view commercial systems where even the hackers have an entrepreneurial bent. (Oddly, though, some of the best things in the Net seem to be free.) This is the dark side of Internet/ cyberspace/the information superhighway, and is the vision of those who fear the growing commercial involvement in the Internet. The core community of helpful individuals seems to have disappeared from this Net completely. For those up on the technology, some amusing speculations. Mostly interesting in terms of "spot the technical improbability." copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKCHMERA.RVW 940104 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag