By Eddy Shah
The book is set in the near future where an alternate online reality called Second World is where the vast majority of the Earth’s citizens spend their free time. Hooked up in bio-suits that totally immerse the wearer in this brave new virtual world, people are free to let their minds wander around this world, acting out their, often bizarre and perverse, fantasies with little or no consequence save that they can only spend around a few hours immersed at a time otherwise they run the very real risk of getting web sick and frying their brain upon re-entry to the real world.
Lured away from his birthday celebrations by a Marilyn Monroe avatar, the President of the United States (or at least his mind) is kidnapped and hidden away in Second World, right from under the noses of the Secret Service. With only 24 hours to find him and return his consciousness back to his waiting body before he becomes a dribbling madman, the US government recruit Conor Smith, one of a few ‘GamesMaster’s’ who are the undisputed kings of Second World, to pull out all the stops and find him. With the help of a couple of MIW’s (missing in Web) who know their way around The Brick, the overcrowded central area of Second World, and some of his own ‘real world’ contacts he sets to about finding POTAS. Along the way he uncovers a couple of gruesome murders but finds it increasingly difficult to make the pieces of the puzzle match. But things get worse for our hero when evidence is uncovered that puts his name firmly in the frame for the kidnapping and he ends up having to hide his real body, while he goes back into Second World to dig deeper, find out the truth and clear his name.
As I said at the beginning it’s a half-decent thriller. The characters are, on the whole, okay although some of the government agents are stereotypically black and white. The pacing is pretty good, rising in tempo nicely towards the end and keeping you fairly well hooked in but there’s nothing new here for fans of sci-fi and that, for me, is always going to be the problem.
The premise is decent enough, but taking the ideas behind sites like Second Life and Alpha World and expanding them to make them fully immersive, with full body suits that let your consciousness escape your body, will seem like new and exciting stuff to newcomers to the genre, but it’s fairly old hat to most seasoned readers. Even the story, which comes across as part Hearts Of Darkness, part Johnny Mnemonic and part Strange Days is a bit hackneyed and I can even remember our esteemed Festival Director, Louis Savy, penning the beginnings of a story that matched this one practically beat-for-beat at least 10 years ago! So while it’s competently put together and will help you kill a few hours on a beach somewhere, it’s not going to set the world on fire. But here’s the thing, what makes this book an interesting read is not so much the story, but the commercial and business world that the story revolves around. We live in a reality where online or digital technology is all-pervasive – on our TVs, on our phones, at work, at home – and we are surrounded constantly by images, video, audio and text and endless opportunities to buy goods or pay for services or ‘experience’ things that we didn’t know we wanted. Eddy Shah knows this, and his media experience tells.
What he has done is very cleverly built two worlds, the real world and Second World, where the right labels are just as important as ever and owning the rights to those labels can mean riches beyond the dreams of avarice. Can you imagine paying more for a virtual designer-label watch than you would for a real one because you want to be seen to be as ‘virtually rich’ as you are in reality? Playing games becomes a real experience where teams can wander through fully realised worlds, fighting dragons with swords to complete immense quests – till next week – and for those who fancy a fully immersive romantic assignation with Marilyn Monroe or Ava Gardner or Humphrey Bogart, you can, as long as you can pay, and the rights to those likenesses and personalities are owned by major corporations who exploit them as ‘working avatars’.
But it goes deeper than that. In a virtual world that is heavily policed by governments and organisations, you cannot just stake a claim to a piece of ‘the dark areas’ and light it up to claim your own land. Virtual real estate is bought and sold and licensed like anything else, as are the buildings on them and the activities that are allowed to take place in them so, as you can imagine, owning the property, virtually as well as in reality, is where the real money is at. It’s these parts of the book that, for most hardened sci-fi readers, will hold the most fascination. It’s not that much of a leap to imagine that as digital rights become increasingly important in the world of entertainment that everything will eventually be for sale and, given that the baser instincts of man have driven the development of almost all entertainment technology, what those rights will be exploited for.
Mr Shah has written a decent enough, high-tech thriller that has a few twists and turns and some nice flourishes. While it won’t dazzle any hard-core fans of the genre it will keep most people happy for a few hours, which is good enough, I think. But what makes it more interesting is his take on the business dynamic of Second World, if only for that, it’s definitely worth a read.
Second World is published by Pan Macmillan and is available from Amazon
Eddy Shah’s website is, unbelievably, http://www.eddyshah.com/