CyberStorm (World War C) Paperback – March 23, 2013

I absolutely love the technology/virtual world genre that's received a second life recently. I've been plowing through books like Ready Player One, Snow Crash, Neuromancer and more. I find them, and absorb their digital goodness, using the Kindle software of course!, book after book. On a recent trip to PAX EAST I needed a new book in case I couldn't sleep on my flight. So I took to the Kindle section and started browsing around, and stumbled across CYBERSTORM. A quick read of the synopsis and I figured it would be a fun book to start my trip with, and obviously you can't beat the price. So I picked it up.Needless to say even though I was exhausted boarding my plane to Boston... I didn't sleep a wink. I was instantly hooked. Matthew Mather has crafted a tale that pulls you in with it's grounded nature. Unlike so many books it's very grounded in reality, and shows you how we're on our way to setting the foundation for those "futuristic" books mentioned above.His tale doesn't involve cyber worlds, or immersive games... but instead shows us how the world we live in now is already reliant so much on data technology we take for granted every day with our phones and general internet access. How so much of our world is plugged into the data highway, and we don't even know it. Then what happens when that goes away, and we are left to fend for ourselves because we've grown so reliant on those technologies being a part of our life. It's completely grounded nature makes it compelling, scary, and instantly draws you in.The thing, though, that makes this book great is that it's really a story about a group just trying to survive. He set a believable premise, which yes even as cheesy as it "COULD" have been talking about the reliance on data he does it so well. He then tells us a tale of how this event changes the life of our group, and what would they do to survive? It's very Robert Kirkman to a degree. While he constantly gives us insight into why this event is causing all the damage it is we're still very much following this group mainly, and how they survive and in some ways reshape their corner of the world.By the end of the book I was craving more. I had to know more about Vince! Here's the best part... I never read the ATOPIA Chronicles. This book is the perfect segway into his ATOPIA compendum in which we learn more about a few characters in the book (basically this book gives us their beginnings, and motivation) and we start to see that cyber world made famous by some of the books above become a reality in ATOPIA and Cyberstorm set that transition in such a way it feels almost plausable!I'm rambling, which I have a tendency to do. So let's sum the above up in 3 sentences.- A great read about an event that changes our world, but in a way that's grounded and not via the typical threat of death via nukes, etc.- It's a great tale of a group of people stuck in this situation, and how they adapt and survive.- It creates a great bridge into ATOPIA which jumps forward with the tech, but now it feels almost natural because Cyberstorm set your mind on that path.I highly recommend the read.

I recall Piers Anthony once used the term "message novel" to describe one of his books about the deterioration of the environment and mankind's regression into "survival of the fittest." One of his points was that seemingly positive developments in human society (I recall a cure for cancer being one of them) had unforeseen negative side effects (in that case, massive overpopulation because diseases served to "thin the herd," so to speak).I view "CyberStorm" as being in the vein of a "message novel" rather than being pure fiction written solely as entertainment. I suppose if the name "The Perfect Storm" hadn't already been taken for a novel and a major George Clooney film, that name might have been perfect for this story as well, as the protagonist makes clear that it was a series of incidents that all occurred with precisely the worst possible timing that led to the "cyberstorm" that gives the novel its name. I found the story particularly chilling because it's so plausible in so many ways. People do rely so much on their computers and their technology that they're lost without them. A humorous version of "cyberstorm" might be how kids these days seem unable to entertain themselves if the power goes out and they can't play video games. This book may give me pause as I think about a few home-improvement projects I'd been considering. For several years I've been interested in a wi-fi thermostat so that I could control the heat and AC remotely. (Example: You go to Florida for two weeks and you peg the AC at 80°F while you're gone because it's a waste to cool an empty house. With the wi-fi thermostat, you use your phone to send it a command when you're on your way home so the AC will start cooling the place in advance of your arrival.) Reading this novel made me think maybe an old-fashioned dumb thermostat isn't such a bad thing. It may be hot when you get home, but as long as the battery has juice, the thing works.I'm giving four stars because I often felt many of the characters in this story don't develop much. I didn't really find myself caring about them as much as I might in a longer novel or a series. However, I suppose in a "message novel" the characters are simply a vehicle to make a point. I'm reminded of Lee Correy's "Shuttle Down," a novel from the early 1980s written to make the point that NASA hadn't made emergency landing plans for space shuttle launches from the West Coast. The characters in that novel existed solely to advance the series of problems that could be expected to occur when a space shuttle landed on Easter Island. I view most of the characters in "CyberStorm" in a similar way. It wasn't really important for many of them to develop. It's also important in this vein to remember that this is a short novel. It doesn't include actual page numbers and I therefore don't have a sense for its true length, but the dots on my Kindle's home screen suggest it's about two-thirds to three-quarters the length of the previous book I'd read, and that book was around 325 pages or so. That means "CyberStorm" is probably in the 250- to 300-page range. You can only do so much with your characters in that amount of space. (In fairness, I should also note that a lot of my reading over the years has consisted of epic series that take many years to publish, such as Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time or George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire. I know it's not reasonable at all to expect the same sort of character development in a 250-page novel that you'd find in a 14-book 14,000-page series.)Some of the reviews here on Amazon criticize "CyberStorm" for a somewhat abrupt ending. The action ends suddenly and then all is explained after the fact. I'm not entirely sure what I think of the ending. On the one hand, I like to see characters solve their problems and discover things for themselves. On the other hand, that sort of thing wasn't reasonable in this book. Because I do not like to put spoilers in reviews I won't say why that is, so I'll just say that the characters' circumstances at the time of the narrative shift in question are such that there is no way they could solve matters on their own, and there was certainly no way they could discover everything that's explained in the subsequent pages. When I initially read the ending I found it rather jarring. There's no denying it's a very sudden shift that comes across as sort of in the vein of deus ex machina (that's probably unfair, but I can't think of a better description). After I'd thought about it for an hour or two I was more favorably inclined. There wasn't really any further the author could go with the storyline as it was progressing at that point and the sudden shift was a clean way to tie everything up.All in all, a good and gripping read. I assume most people know someone who's skeptical of all things electronic or who won't get, for example, an E-ZPass to pay tolls because he thinks it's a conspiracy or whatever, and I assume most of us roll our eyes a bit at those people. This novel makes me think maybe some of those people aren't as loony as they sometimes seem.