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Dream Park | Rating | |
| A | |||
| Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Dream Park | Dream Park, The Barsoom Project, The California Voodoo Game | ||
Dream Park is the amusement park of the future, full of rides, attractions, and holographic trickery matched nowhere else in 2051. But there is no attraction in the park to match the Games, fully immersive real-life role-playing extravaganzas. And the South Seas Treasure Game looks to be a real smash, especially since its first run-through will be a kind of grudge match between the Game Master, who runs the Game, and the Loremaster whose job it is to see the other players through it alive and win. But when a bit of industrial espionage gets someone killed, that trumps everything. Now Dream Park's Security chief is going into the Game itself as a player in order to ferret out the culprit. As a security chief he's quite capable, but this is the first time he's ever played in a Game. Not only does he have to surreptitiously question the players, he needs to stay alive and playing, and the Game Master has vowed not to pull any punches.
In Dream Park the authors have conceived of the ultimate amusement park. The rides are better than anything available today, such as the gravity Whip, which simulates zero gee with carefully calculated parabolas. They're amazing, but not impossible to imagine one day being built. They don't require any really outrageous technology, unless you count the holograms that provide infinte possiblities. It is Disneyland to the nth degree, with all the magic future technology has to offer. I certainly wouldn't mind visiting a park like that. Heck, people would be champing at the bit to go.
The Games, too, would be a blast, if they were at all possible. They are something akin to LARPs, if such ever had a budget to rival a Hollywoodblockbuster. I'm not sure it's possible, though, even with the gimmicks described in the book. And for damn sure it isn't feasible. I can't for the life of me imagine that Dream Park would get as much money out of it as they put in to make the production, not with only one or two dozen people going through every week or so.
For years, this very truth - and I do maintain it is a truth - had prevented me from even cracking the cover on this book and its sequels, despite the many recommendations I'd heard about it. The concept is just too impractical. But once I got a little ways into it, I found something interesting: it doesn't much matter. Just as the novice gamers in the book eventually stop trying to figure out how this or that effect is done, after a time I found myself too immersed in the story to bother trying to figure out how such a thing could be faked. The implausibility of the core concept just ceased to matter, because the supporting material was just too good to let it matter.
There were two stories, here, one inside the other - and, interestingly, it can be argued which is which. One is Griffin's attempts to track down the killer, and the other is that of the Game and its players. The latter is a unique modern fantasy blending myth and history and magic. It was fascinating to watch how the props were meant to "kill" but not kill, how the characters puzzled their way past the obstacles the Game Master placed before them, and so on. The characters were all interesting, as well, fitting their roles well and each contributing something unique to the Game and the book.
Dream Park was clearly inspired by pen-and-paper RPGs. Even if some of the terminology hadn't been lifted from Dungeons and Dragons and its like, the Game felt exactly like a session or two around a kitchen table transformed into a book. This is what it might be like if such a game really could be played out for real, in all its glory. But the book was before its time. Between the concepts of virtual reality and its deeper cousin, cyberspace, there are far more believable methods imaginable these days for a story where people act out a game "for real."
But, to be honest, I'm kind of glad this book doesn't make use of these concepts. It would have changed the murder mystery significantly, for one thing. And, misgivings aside, Niven and Barnes did a very good job of making such a Game seem possible. The whole affair's impractical nature is a big burden to bear, but the story and the characters manage to pull it off.
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