About the book

About PsyBot

In this psychological thriller of the near future, a virtual reality virus sends Joe Norton on the adventure of his life. PsyBot is every programmer's nightmare: the bug that shows up on the user side of the interface. With instructions to kill and a baffling menu of choices, Norton's all-too-ordinary life in Philadelphia is coming apart at the seams. Is the only way out, to go further in? Never mind that one shaky relationship gives way to another, or that his job is jeopardized by a corporate buyout. Norton has another mission to attend to as he discovers that virtual reality is not confined to hardware. This literate cross-genre novel recalls the intelligent science fiction of Michael Crichton, William Gibson and Philip K. Dick - or the popular films Inception, Minority Report, Source Code, Total Recall and The Adjustment Bureau. PsyBot's near-future Philadelphia stands as the prequel to a cyberpunk world, society at large unaffected... yet. PsyBot, cast most narrowly as a cyberpunk prequel, is both speculative technothriller and character study. Its themes comprise both personal growth and corporate machination. The language aims for that balance of gritty description and eloquent quest that can satisfy equally readers of sci-fi or morality tale. The use of genre elements - alien abduction, offworld travel, astral projection - is effectively ironic, introduced by the antagonistic computer virus to tempt and tease, to call into question the arbitrary fabric of every virtual reality we yearn for or claim to inhabit.

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