Saturday 9 October 2010

SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW: Zendegi - Greg Egan

Release Date: 17/06/10

BOOK BLURB:

Nasim is a young computer scientist, hoping to work on the Human Connectome Project: a plan to map every neural connection in the human brain. But funding for the project is cancelled, and Nasim ends up devoting her career to Zendegi, a computerised virtual world used by millions of people. Fifteen years later, a revived Connectome Project has published a map of the brain. Zendegi is facing fierce competition from its rivals, and Nasim decides to exploit the map to fill the virtual world with better Proxies: the bit-players that bring its crowd scenes to life. As controversy rages over the nature and rights of the Proxies, a friend with terminal cancer begs Nasim to make a Proxy of him, so some part of him will survive to help raise his orphaned son. But Zendegi is about to become a battlefield ...


REVIEW:

To be honest this book is a none starter right from the get go. It’s pretty mundane, the science within pretty standard and all in all a very weak principle cast member who really doesn’t achieve much within this title. It’s slow, it’s got no real pace and at the end of the day a book that is well below what I’ve come to expect from this established author. A real let down and a title that I felt was more of a book that relies on the authors name to sell rather than one that should have made it to the final printing. A real let down.

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