Connect by Julian Gough

Connect

Julian Gough

The beautifully shaded and emotive relationship between the techie, autistic teenager and his worried, protective mother is satisfying enough, so it's almost an anticlimax when the cyber-warfare thriller action kicks in, but that's more than compensated by the metaphysical, hyper-evolutionary pyrotechnics- Gaia hypothesis meets The Matrix via The Bourne Identity.

Extract
For a moment, by default - because guns have always meant games- Colt applies game logic; assumes that he has transitioned back into the gameworld, or forgotten he was in the gameworld; and Colt reaches for his own gun; but he doesn't have one.
And disentangling the levels of reality; realising that his father is real, and has a real gun, and that Colt is unarmed; this has taken up a lot of realtime, because some of the thinking is using his old brain structures; it is slooooooow; and his new brain structures can't decide what to do until he knows what is real and what is not.
Parallels
  • The Player of Games by Iain M Banks
  • The Sport of Kings by C E Morgan
  • Idoru by William Gibson