Utopia
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4.0 • 9 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The world's grandest theme park is a place known for its cutting-edge robots, awe-inspiring holographics, and white-knuckle thrills. Stretching out beneath a vast golden dome in the desert north of Las Vegas, Utopia attracts some 65,000 visitors a day who travel into the pleasure dome via a gleaming monorail to experience state-of-the-art rides, fireworks, light shows, amazing robotics and even a gambling casino. When serious mishaps start to disrupt the once flawless technology and a popular rollercoaster nearly kills a rider, the brilliant computer engineer who designed much of the technology is summoned to put things right. But on the day that Andrew Warne arrives, Utopia finds itself in the grip of something far more sinister and every man, woman and child trapped in the dome are at risk. As the minutes tick away, Warne's struggle to outwit his opponents becomes increasingly urgent - his teenage daughter is just one of the unsuspecting potential victims amongst the crowd in the park. With hair-raising thrills and heart-stopping twists, Lincoln Child takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride which is a complete tour-de-force.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A fantastic near-future amusement park is the setting for this techno-thriller by Child (coauthor with Douglas Preston of the Preston/Child bestsellers) in his first solo outing. Utopia, a Nevada amusement park extraordinaire, features several elaborate holographic theme worlds (like Camelot and Gaslight, which meticulously recreates Victorian England), all run by an ultrasophisticated computer system and serviced by robots. When a series of fluke accidents culminates in the near death of a boy on a Gaslight roller coaster, the Utopia brain trust calls in the original computer engineer, Dr. Andrew Warne. Warne arrives with his bristly 14-year-old daughter, Georgia, and sets to work solving the Gaslight problem, though he can't believe that the system is willfully malfunctioning, as the evidence seems to indicate. To complicate matters, Utopia's manager, Sarah Boatwright, is Warne's ex-girlfriend, and an obvious mutual attraction exists between Warne and Utopia systems controller Teresa Bonifacio. Just as Warne gets to work, violent attacks erupt all over the park, masterminded by an impassive psychopath known as John Doe and carried out by his cadre of henchmen, including a computer genius and a crack marksman. For three hours, Doe holds the park hostage, and Warne, Boatwright and Bonifacio race against the clock to foil his plans. Child creates a convincingly self-contained world, populated by amusing creations like a cyber-dog called Wingnut and clever descriptions of futuristic amusement park rides. Sluggish prose and an overload of technical detail slow the pace, but Child proves he is capable of fireworks (literally) at the rousing conclusion.
Customer Reviews
Good book
I've been buying Lincoln Child's and Douglas Preston's books lately, having discovered them as co-authors of the Agent Pendergast series (which I adore, being a Sherlock Holmes fan). This book is another good read; body count isn't TOO over the top! With many of both authors' books you can see, in your mind's eye, the Hollywood action film they haven't (yet) playing along at the same time.
My main (minor) annoyance about this book is actually the editor's or publisher's fault - there's several places where words have run together and it breaks the "fourth wall" of fiction, if you will. Proofing should have picked up, for example, "outalaminated" (p22 on the iPad). There's a few of these scattered throughout the book. These wouldn't be allowed to happen in a paper book (right?), so ebooks shouldn't have sloppier standards.