Novelnaut

Exploring the Depths of Novels and Writing

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline is another book I’ve gotten in for review.  It’s fresh on the shelves today, and it looks pretty exciting.  From the blurb, it sounds like a really cool concept.  He’s taken a future world and given them a virtual reality world where they can immerse themselves, ala Snow Crash.  It’s right up my alley.  Like The Last Four Things, I got my hands on an excerpt for you all to enjoy.  Or, you can just go buy the kindle version of the book and start reading it on your kindle, now.

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Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest. I was sitting in my hideout watching cartoons when the news bulletin broke in on my videofeed, announcing that James Halliday had died during the night.

I’d heard of Halliday, of course. Everyone had. He was the video game designer responsible for creating the OASIS, a massively multiplayer on-line game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis. The unprecedented success of the OASIS had made Halliday one of the wealthiest people in the world.

At first, I couldn’t understand why the media was making such a big deal of the billionaire’s death. After all, the people of Planet Earth had other concerns. The ongoing energy crisis. Catastrophic climate change. Widespread famine, poverty, and disease. Half a dozen wars. You know: “dogs and cats living together . . . mass hysteria!” Normally, the news-feeds didn’t interrupt everyone’s interactive sitcoms and soap operas un-less something really major had happened. Like the outbreak of some new killer virus, or another major city vanishing in a mushroom cloud. Big stuff like that. As famous as he was, Halliday’s death should have war-ranted only a brief segment on the evening news, so the unwashed masses could shake their heads in envy when the newscasters announced the obscenely large amount of money that would be doled out to the rich man’s heirs.

But that was the rub. James Halliday had no heirs.

He had died a sixty-seven-year-old bachelor, with no living relatives and, by most accounts, without a single friend. He’d spent the last fifteen years of his life in self-imposed isolation, during which time—if the rumors were to be believed—he’d gone completely insane. So the real jaw-dropping news that January morning, the news that had everyone from Toronto to Tokyo crapping in their cornflakes, concerned the contents of Halliday’s last will and testament, and the fate of his vast fortune.

Halliday had prepared a short video message, along with instructions that it be released to the world media at the time of his death. He’d also arranged to have a copy of the video e-mailed to every single OASIS user that same morning. I still remember hearing the familiar electronic chime when it arrived in my inbox, just a few seconds after I saw that first news bulletin.

His video message was actually a meticulously constructed short film titled Anorak’s Invitation. A famous eccentric, Halliday had harbored a lifelong obsession with the 1980s, the decade during which he’d been a teenager, and  Anorak’s Invitation was crammed with obscure ’80s pop culture references, nearly all of which were lost on me the first time I viewed it.

The entire video was just over five minutes in length, and in the days and weeks that followed, it would become the most scrutinized piece of film in history, surpassing even the Zapruder film in the amount of painstaking frame-by-frame analysis devoted to it. My entire generation would come to know every second of Halliday’s message by heart.

I’m always up for some techno-fiction!

Today is the release day for The Last Four Things by Paul Hoffman.  I recently got it in for review, and am impressed with what I’ve read so far.  Keep your eyes out for a review in the next couple of weeks.  Until then, I was able to secure a bit of a preview for you.  Here’s an excerpt from the prologue of the book:

Imagine. A young assassin, no more than a boy really, is lying carefully hidden in the long green and black bulrushes that grow in great profusion along the rivers of the Vallombrosa. He has been waiting for a long time but he is a patient creature in his way and the thing he waits for is perhaps more precious to him than life. Beside him are a bow of yew and arrows tipped with black country steel capable of penetrating even the costliest armour if you’re close enough. Not that there will be any need for that today because the young man is not waiting for some rascal deserving of his murder but only a water bird. The light thickens and the swan makes wing through the rooky wood, the cawing crows complaining bitterly at the unfairness of her beauty as she lands upon the water like the stroke of a painter’s hand upon a canvas, direct and beautifully itself. She swims with all the elegance for which her kind is famous, though you will never have seen movement quite so graceful in such still and smoky air on such steeple grey water.

Then the arrow, sharp as hate, shears through the same air she blesses and misses her by several feet. And she’s off , web strength along with her grace convey her whiteness back into the air and away to safety. The young man is standing now and watching the swan escape.

‘I’ll get you next time you treacherous slut!’ he shouts and throws down the bow, which alone of all the instruments of death (knife, sword, elbow, teeth) he has never been able to master and yet is the only one that can give him hope of restitution for his broken heart. But not even then. For though this is a dream, not even in his dreams can he hit a barn door from twenty yards. He wakes and broods for half an hour. Real life is careful of the sensitivities of desperadoes but even the greatest scourge, and Thomas Cale is certainly one of those, can be mocked with impunity in his nightmares. Then he goes back to sleep to dream again of the autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa, and the great white wings beating into swirls the early morning mist.

Excerpted from THE LAST FOUR THINGS © 2011 by Paul Hoffman. Published by Dutton, A
Member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Excerpted with permission from the publisher. All Rights
Reserved.

It’s a bit difficult to get the full feel for the story from that excerpt, but you get a feel for the writing that Hoffman does and I find it to be very good.  There’s something about the flow of it, and the language that really gets me reading.  It’s the second book in a series, but the prologue and first bits do an very good job of catching you up to the story.  Pick up a copy at Amazon.