Rim: A Novel of Virtual Reality

Journalist/editor Besher's first novel, falling somewhere among cyberpunk, Douglas Adams and ``Buckaroo Banzai,'' has all the normal faults of amateurism and invents some of its own. Frank Gobi, professor of ``transcultural corporate anthropology and organizational shamanism,'' a former ``consciousness detective,'' is called in when Satori City, or ``Virtualopolis,'' an online burg the size of Manhattan, crashes, stranding thousands of users, including Gobi's teenage son, Trevor. Behind the crash are the shenanigans of two Japanese megacorporations struggling over a Tibetan program, ``Tantrix,'' that could make all of reality virtual. Gobi enters into virtuality to triumph over a virus that takes the form of Tibetan zombies and make the world safe for unreality. Along the way are irritating shifts in point of view, seemingly important characters who vanish, characters-including Gobi-who remain blanks, forced exposition, stilted dialogue, cliches, addled construction, and adolescent sexism. Frequent jokey uses of religious/mystical concepts, while sometimes adroit, are more often sheer gibberish. Besher has not given us a world in which mystical powers and high-tech/cyberscience can co-exist, never mind interact, and there is no internal logic here; Gobi does one impossible thing after another. Besher is clever, but this garbled, maladroit fiction remains a virtual novel at best. (Oct.)