Headcrash

I enjoyed Snowcrashed as a parody of Snow Crash and cyberpunk books. I do not share other reviewers opinion that it is better than those other books. In fact, Headcrashed will only make sense if you have read those other books.

This is the official notice that cyberpunk isnt really dead, but maybe it should be. An excellent send up of both the oh so cool cyberpredators and their heartless corporrate foes. Dilbertesque management humor meets cyberpunk and neither side wins. Highly recommended.

This is the funniest cyberpunk novel I have ever read. This book takes a crack at evrything from political correctness to whacked out religion. Some parts are so funny you have to stop reading because of the tears in your eyes!

In a massive sea of cyberpunk books that take themselves way too seriously, HeadCrash is a shining example of how humor can turn an ordinary novel into a piece of literature that everyone should read. Bruce Bethke has created a book that is truly engaging for the reader. One way he accomplished this is through an interesting plot line with numerous twists that kept me constantly on guard. HeadCrash follows the story of :cybergeek Jack Burroughs; a.k.a. Pyle; a.k.a. MAX_KOOL. The story starts with Jack going through a management shake up at MDE, Monolithic Diversified Enterprises. Later on, after Jack suddenly finds himself in a sticky situation, the reader watches as Jack uses his cyberspace alter ego, MAX_KOOL, and an embarrassing way to interface with the internet, to do a hack job for a mysterious woman known only as Amber. Saying anymore about the plot would lessen the amazing experience that any reader would have reading this book. The engaging plot and Bethkes outrageously funny style of writing made reading this book a truly positive experience.

Bethke did a great job of getting into the details of network technology, extrapolating the future, including the inside jokes, and keeping the book readable. On top of all that, its funny and it has a good plot with some seriously STRANGE twists to it. With any luck, well see more books in this style from Bethke. Ill be first in line to pick one up.

Neal Stephenson meets Alfred Bester and the result is quite wonderful. I read at least half of it out loud to my <long suffering> girlfriend. A *great* summer read.

One of my favorite books ever. I keep hoping they put it on the Kindle marketplace but they havent yet.

A light hearted and much needed satire of a genre obsessed with being deadly serious. Someone had to write a book like this eventually, and Im glad Bethke did it. The plot is well constructed, the ending is intriguing, and the story itself is loaded with so much comic fodder and food for thought that Ive found myself re-reading this book several times, often without even intending to. Should be on every SF fans bookshelf.

Headcrash is a very good Cyberpunk-style book, especially considering that it is his first effort. The style is straightforward and much easier to ingest than Gibsons novels, which tend more towards the artsy end of things. I preferred Stephensons books Snowcrash and especially The Diamond Age, but Diamond Age and this book suffered the same problem: a weak ending. I dont know if it is something about this subgenre that demands obtuse/confusing endings, but I get the feeling that it is the ride, not the destination that is the point. I will certainly read any other efforts by this author-- the ride is good enough to keep me interested.

I found this piece simply, delightfully dapper! Rather than wankering around trying to re-invent the wheel of cyber-noir (read: high tech hard boiled hard/soft sci-fi techno mysticism add water have story gumbo), this book introduces a level of cultural and technical extrapolation that simply doesnt occure elsewhere as brilliantly. For example, William Gibson, albeit a genious on an even playing field, gets very fuzzy around the edges on the technical front. Thats fine, sure, but when you pick up a book and personally HAVE an understanding of current technology, and additionally, know a bit about how that came to be, fuzzy doesnt work. Fingers need to be stuck into the proverbial stigmatas, the deeper the better, and this book delivers all the wonderful techno-babble derived from all the real nick-knacks that are and have been. Bethke has an understanding of the corporate atmosphere rivalling Scott Adams, a verve for banter similar to ol guru Douglas Adams, a perception of how artificial intelligence might actually play out that envokes Rudy Ruckers works, and an understanding of dual existence (of real geek versus virtual glam). He constructs actions, reprocutions and most of all consiquences as subtle and deep as a Haruki Murakami short story, but also makes a point of tying in all the contrived gimics (while similtaneously satiring) that have made Critin and Speilberg such wealthy men indeed. He scribes rich descriptions of settings and manages to work them into the narrative without destroying the pace (something Bruce Sterling could stand to work on). Bethke unabashedly looks at trends, gender issues, cultures (contrived and otherwise), political correctness, decades worth of ridicule vs. acceptance, Orwellian beurocracy (no one gets fired anymore, he he), Artistic derevations, HTML scripting/hotpoints (one click to nowhere)/java-esque applets vs. linear text, generational memory, musical persistency, pop/pulp mass media entertainment, coloquialisms (new and old, like quoting Star Wars/Trek without knowing where the utterance origionally came from, or caring), network games on the LAN during business hours, all this and a singing coffee maker, too. There is a lot of little things going on here, snippets of jibe and awareness that the casual tourist might easily pass by. Honestly, as a jaded, cynical reader who makes PC video games for a living, it has been truely refreshing to read a book that was so dead on target about how things are and could easily be, a book that doesnt curb bets or hide away flaws behind mystical shaman-come-author drivel. I can understand why he won his award. Phillip K. Dick had, above all else, a sense of irony. Like Phillip, Max Headroom, Jeff Noon or Neal Stephenson, Bethke has presented a piece that depicts said irony. The delightful surprise here is that Bethke (like a technogeek Hunter S. Thomson or William S. Burroughs) bothers to pull away all the curtains and pull off all the scabs to present all the oxymoronic, intermingled, ever mutating elements that create the great ironies of the world at large, now and to be. He even comments on all the resolution issues plagueing multi-player games today: to 3dfx or not to 3dfx, optimized build vs. debug, even to cache texture memory or to just run wireframe (he, of course, makes all that quit amusing, as if it werent already amusing enough). Makes for one hell of a ride, and I can only hope for more to come. Cheers!