Review The Demi-Monde Winter by Rod Rees
The Demi-Monde:
1. A subclass of society whose members embrace a decadent lifestyle and evince loose morals.
2. A shadow world where the norms of civilized behavior have been abandoned.
3. A massive multiple-player simulation technology that re-creates in a wholly realistic cyber-milieu the threat-ambiance and no-warning aspects of a hi-intensity, deep-density, urban Asymmetric Warfare Environment.
4. Hell.
Welcome to the Demi-Monde, the ultimate in virtual reality—a military training ground and vivid, simulated world of cruelty and chaos run by psychopaths, madmen and fanatics.
If you die here, you die in the Real World . . .
In the year 2018, the Demi-Monde is the most sophisticated, complex and unpredictable computer simulation ever created, devised specifically to train soldiers for the nightmarish reality of urban warfare. A virtual world of eternal civil conflict, its thirty million inhabitants—“Dupes”—are ruled by cyber-duplicates of some of history’s cruelest tyrants: the fanatical Nazi butcher Reinhard Heydrich; Stalin’s arch executioner Lavrentii Beria; the torture-loving Grand Inquisitor TomÁs de Torquemada; the Reign of Terror’s bloodthirsty mastermind Maximilien Robespierre.
But something has gone horribly wrong inside the Demi-Monde, and the U.S. president’s daughter, Norma, has been lured into this terrifying shadow world, only to be trapped there. Her last hope of rescue is Ella Thomas, an eighteen-year-old jazz singer and very reluctant heroine. But when Ella infiltrates the Demi-Monde and begins her hunt for Norma, she soon discovers the walls containing the evils of this simulated environment are dissolving—and the Real World is in far more danger than anyone knows. With the help of resistors determined to understand their world, Ella must race to save Norma and stop an apocalypse . . . but the clock is ticking.
So okay. The whole idea as it is stated here seems amazingly expansive does it not? A semi-cyber world, where simulations are run by the militaries cruelest dictators and it trains its soldiers to perform better in warfare. But when you combine that with the shadows of the world blending and the line between the cyber world and the real one blurring, there’s a ton of potential problems as it causes those who get stuck in the game to be forced to live it out in order to escape.
The idea is a bit like Avatar meeting the great 80′s cyber end of the world thrillers, with a little of that Bruce Willis movie with the walking avatars in it. There is also a little of the whole end of the world cyber movement aspect to it too. Its a little Mad Max meets Avatar which is kinda cool but at the same time there are A LOT Of moving parts and they keep moving through the entire book. There’s just so much that keeps changing but the background is extremely detailed, very well thought out, amazingly executed and very organized.
I mean its a great premise. How do you make your soldiers better, you put them in a simulator that is like plugging into a 3D world with every single problem and the worst criminals in history running it, so that your soldiers are taxed beyond their natural inclinations and instincts so that they can learn to be better, faster and immune to the horrors of war because they have all ready faced it.
It sucked you in, for sure, you were super invested in this story, finding out what was happening, as you find out the whole plot is because the presidents daughter was trapped in the Warsaw ghetto in the story as the german troops were bearing down. There was just non stop action and adventure and it was exceedingly dark and disturbing, yet at the same time, the whole book semed to be just an extension of this cyberworld idea. The majority of the book was dedicated to explaining the cyberworld and the premise, but the whole book was exceedingly long, but its such a unique idea, and a unique premise that you’re, or at least I was spellbound.
This will be a series, as the loose ends and title indicates, but I’m not sure exactly how the book will come back together.
It was different, exciting, completely unique, and interesting.
Overall Rating: B-
