Idlewild
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
“Idlewild builds, not just in tension but in what it demands from the reader, ending up as a dark exploration of hidden realities.”—The Guardian
“Sagan provides plenty of suspense and perfectly captures the angry adolescent solipsism that makes kids into hackers and superheroes.”—Entertainment Weekly
He calls himself Halloween. He is a unique student attending a most prestigious boarding school—the Idlewild Immersive Virtual Reality Academy. While his body sleeps, his mind interacts with those of his fellow students under the tutelage of the enigmatic artificial intelligence known as Maestro.
An inexplicable energy surge has damaged the IVR and fragmented Halloween’s mind. Convinced this anomaly was deliberately triggered to kill him, Halloween is desperate to recover his memories—only to discover a devastating revelation about his true existence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Billed as a near-future thriller, Sagan's first novel plods through terrain all too familiar to SF readers. The narrator awakens with amnesia in a mysterious realm easily identified as a computer-generated virtual reality, fraught with metaphors and symbols. He slowly grasps that his name is Halloween, and that he may have murdered someone called Lazarus. Eventually, he realizes he's one of a handful of high school students attending "Immersive Virtual Reality" classes at the Idlewild IVR Academy, sponsored by the Gedaechtnis Corporation, a multinational biotech company. Intimidated by the villainous teacher, Maestro, and wary of his fellow students, Halloween is determined to recover his memory, apparently damaged in a power surge that threatened to destroy the IVR, and learn what really happened to the missing Lazarus. Despite a compelling twist near the middle, the low tension and meandering plot will likely frustrate the primary target audience, mainstream fans of such futuristic action films as The Matrix and Minority Report. Sagan may not be the next Philip K. Dick or William Gibson, but he shows enough talent here to suggest he can improve on pacing in the promised sequel.
