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Psychotrope | Rating | |
| A | |||
| Lisa Smedman | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Shadowrun | Never Deal with a Dragon, Choose Your Enemies Carefully, Find Your Own Truth, 2XS, Changeling, Never Trust an Elf, Into the Shadows, Streets of Blood, Shadowplay, Night's Pawn, Striper Assassin, Lone Wolf, Fade to Black, Nosferatu, Burning Bright, Who Hunts the Hunter, House of the Sun, Worlds Without End, Just Compensation, Black Madonna, Preying for Keeps, Dead Air, The Lucifer Deck, Steel Rain, Shadowboxer, Headhunters, Stranger Souls, Clockwork Assylum, Beyond the Pale, Blood Sport, Technobabel, Wolf and Raven, Psychotrope, The Terminus Experiment, Run Hard, Die Fast, Crossroads, The Forever Drug, Ragnarock, Tails You Lose, The Burning Time, Born to Run, Poison Agendas, Fallen Angels, Drops of Corruption, Aftershock, A Fistful of Data | ||
It's an ordinary day on the Seattle LTG. Until precisely 09:47:00, that is, when the system suddenly goes haywire. Data gets through just fine, but every decker is abducted and subjected to their worst nightmares, over and over. And they can't log out. It'll be up to five ordinary people who somehow escaped this effect to track down the cause and end it, or thousands, perhaps millions of people will be driven insane, or killed when the system inevitably crashes.
Smedman presents readers here with perhaps the best depiction of the Matrix to date. The Matrix is supposed to be a futuristic version of the internet, essentially a giant computer network experienced with the senses instead of through a computer screen. Everything in the Matrix is a symbol, an analogy for something else. But some of the analogies in other books stretch things to the breaking point, or past it. I can't understand how this or that is supposed to represent something else, and I don't see how the characters know it. Here, however, things are a bit odd, especially once the LTG gets taken over, but I can see how things work. Everything makes sense, including the Matrix as a whole. Since the entire book takes place within its electronic bounds, that is a pretty important thing to get straight, and Smedman does a good job of it.
Psychotrope gives readers an intriguing look inside the world of the Otaku, as well, those emergine users who can log onto the Matrix without the aid of a cyberdeck. It always kind of irked me that they just appeared out of nowhere, and the explanations of the "Great Spirit" giving them their powers was hardly any more satisfying. Where did this Great Spirit come from? Now, at least, we know. It makes them more realistic, to me, because the technological frame of the Matrix doesn't mix well with the spiritualism the Otaku show towards the matter.
And this is also a great story. The idea of the ordinary person caught up in great events, and eventually everything depending on him, is not new, but it is well done here. That's thanks, in part, to the unique setting of the whole affair, but it is also due to the affair itself. This is a mystery of gigantic proportions, and their lives are on the line for the simple reason that they were there. They must track down what is going on, and how to set things aright, in a very short time. Figuring out the clues, determining what they mean, and how to apply that knowledge makes for a wonderful and very unconventional mystery.
I did have a bit of a problem, though, with some of the scene transitions. We might watch one person or group, and then switch to watch another. When we return to the first group, they are in an entirely new area, trying to figure out a new puzzle, and ther eis often no explanation of how they got from the one to the other. People join up and leave the groups, and we don't always see it happen or get an explanation why. It sometimes made the story feel a bit disjointed.
I also wasn't too pleased with how some big events are marginalized, merely mentioned in passing. The Renraku arcology, a central landmark in Shadowrun's Seattle, has collapsed; readers learn this by an offhand comment one character makes, and nobody comments on it. I was left wondering when the heck this happened, and why. Perhaps it is meant to tie it into the game universe - perhaps this happened as part of a published campaign scenario - but i would have liked to know a little more detail, or at least the details the public knows.
Other than those two issues, though, the book is simply wonderful. And they're even not very large issues, to be honest. Even the problem with the transitions only truly gets irritating once or twice, and I feel the quality of the rest of the novel easily overcomes such difficulties. Plus, the cover art is very, very cool. All in all, this is definitely among the better books of the series.
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