Reckless Sleep [Paperback]

Our planet is falling apart from tectonic palsy in this offbeat debut novel, thanks to crazed fundamentalists eager for the End Times: "The Earth was dead from the moment ReGenesis triggered the chain of nuclear devices it had set along the floor of the Marianas trench in the Pacific Ocean". With fault-lines cracking everywhere and even safe zones like England wracked by tremors and landslips, society is in a sanity-challenged mess. Escape into virtual reality becomes ever more popular.

VR "gamezones" have a special, painful meaning for Far Warriors like reluctant hero Jon Sciler, who were sent to clean out the hostile native life of the colony world Dirangesept. What seemed a simple task, a shoot-'em-up game with Earth's invincible remote-controlled "autoids" pitted against primitives, went horribly, inexplicably wrong. The remnants of Sciler's team returned scarred and publicly shamed.

Now a vengeful serial killer is apparently targeting Far Warrior veterans--at least those who sign up with the VR outfit Maze. Maze is running endless, mysterious tests on its impossibly realistic gameworld Cathar, haunted by magic and presence that even the operators don't understand. Must dying in Cathar always mean dying in reality? Sciler's struggle to make sense of how he is being manipulated by Maze and stranger forces leads to serious danger in and out of VR--for friends as well as himself--eventually uncovering the true legacy of the Dirangesept disaster. A fast-moving, street-wise, intensely paranoid SF thriller. --David Langford

An extraordinarily exciting SF debut of conspiracies and mistaken realities from a writer who has it in him to be the British heir to Philip K. Dick

When contact was lost with the colony on the planet Dirangesept the Far Warriors were sent to rescue them. Sitting in orbit above the planet controlling their autoid fighting machines by remote psi links, they thought they were invulnerable to whatever had killed the colonists. They were wrong. As hundred upon hundred of the autoids wee destroyed by what appeared to be fabulous mythological beasts the mental agony suffered by the warriors tipped their minds over the edge. And now, years later in a Britain scarred by freak geological collapses and minor volcanic eruptions, with a shadowy populations seeking escape from their grim lives via a contagious addiction to VR games, someone is killing the surviving Far Warriors. Reckless Sleep is a supremely assured and visionary SF debut. London in the far future assumes an almost biblical air as ash from volcanic eruptions forms drifts in the streets and villages disappear overnight into fresh fault lines. There is also a superb examination of the true dilemmas presented by VR. Combining the confident vision of Ken Macleod, the paranoia driven plotting of Philip K. Dick and a wholely original take on the SF standard of Virtual Reality this is a remarkable novel.

Roger Levy is a dentist and lives in Muswell Hill with his wife and children