Headcrash Paperback – 1 Oct 1997

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

My, how things change, and how they stay the same.

Headcrash brings us the story of one Jack Burroughs, a sysadmin for a multinational conglomerate, who keeps his day job only because it finances his excursions into cyberspace, where in virtual reality he is cool dude MAX_KOOL instead of a nerd. Unfortunately, due to internal politics and the innate inability to keep his mouth shut at inopportune moments, Jack loses said day job. Thus unemployed, he plunges head first -- or butt first, as the case may be -- into his virtual world, eventually taking on a commission to do a little cyberpiracy in exchange for a considerable remuneration. The fact that he'll be looting the database of his former employer has nothing to do with his acceptance of the job. Nope, nothing at all.

Written in 1995 and taking place in 2005, the storyline is somewhat dated and improbably technologically advanced from the perspective of 2011. Not being a gamer, I can't say whether the virtual reality environment as depicted here is realistic or even possible. The story moves at a frenetic pace, with hardly a break to catch one's breath. Regardless, it's great fun, full of inside geek jokes and pop culture references.

And seriously, how can you not like a book that begins:

C:\DOS
C:\DOS RUN
RUN, DOS! RUN!

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 doesn't 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. That's 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" doesn't 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 Rucker's 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 doesn't 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 weren't already amusing enough). Makes for one hell of a ride, and I can only hope for more to come. Cheers!

If you like sarcastic comedy then Headcrash is the book for you. I must say at times the comedy got a little annoying, but it kept me chuckling. Bethke did a great job of keeping his audience entertained. I thought the book was very interesting, and one of the best cyberpunk books I have ever read. Headcrash was one of the more believable futuristic novels if you don't count the talking bears, and dolls at the end. Headcrash can be compared to Snowcrash only in Snowcrash the characters could die in virtual reality, and in Headcrash virtual reality is what it was meant to be, a place to escape with out really getting hurt, or was it?
The protagonist in Headcrash, Jack, a.k.a Pyle, alias MAX_KOOL, was fired from his job, and was hired in virtual reality to steal files for another virtual user, Amber. The plot takes an exciting twist when Eliza, the assumed "bad" guy suddenly isn't so horrible. Through out the whole book you are left wondering "who are these virtual characters in real reality?" If you want to know, you have to read the whole book to find out. I must say the ending was very surprising, and kept me hoping there would be a sequel coming soon.
On a scale of 1 to 5 stars, one being the lowest, five being the highest I would give Headcrash 4 stars. I didn't give this book the full five stars because some parts of the book I found to be a little predictable and some parts were a little idiotic, but over all it was very entertaining, and you didn't have to sit down with a dictionary to get through the book. It was written in a very clear manner, as was Bethkes short story Cyberpunk.
Unlike many other cyberpunk books that jump from scene to scene, and have too many characters to keep track of, such as Slant, Headcrash flowed nicely, and the characters were well developed, and clearly separable.