The Swimmer by John Cheever is a pretty good book. It is about a guy named Neddy Merrill who woke up in a hangover and decided to swim from pool to pool back to his house. On the way he goes through some changes and time seems to go by a lot quicker than usual. People that he knew even manage to suprise him on the way by how they treat him. It's a good book about a journey of a boy through life. On the way, he finds things out about his life that he didn't previously know. The book also has some deep meaning and symbolism in it, so be on the look-out and pay close attention when you read it. The rest is up to you...

Silver Screen is far from being a professionally written novel, and it breaks no new ground. If you like cyberpunk, you'll find nothing new or interesting here. If you've never read cyberpunk before, you'd be better off with something truly startling and innovative like "Count Zero" by William Gibson or "Islands in the Net" by Bruce Sterling, both of which feature female protagonists who are more vivid than anything in this novel.

The characters in Silver Screen are two-dimensional, flat and unlifelike. "Show, don't tell," is a dictum of writing workshops that would have been well applied here. Rather than creating characters who live and breathe on the page, showing us their personalities through their actions, the narrator, Anjuli O'Connell, simply tells us what they're like. For example: "Peaches was puzzled. She had no patience with fools or weaklings of any kind. Not the most secure mental immune system in the world, but it worked pretty well for her." Lula has "a relentless practicality which always made me feel I could relax and let her take care of whatever was going on." Or: "Maria was a tank. Pink and fluffy and tasting of candyfloss, but the treads had a way of crushing you to the same lifeless pulp...." This is a lazy way of communicating character, and not very convincing. (Exactly what is a "mental immune system"?)

Quirks and mannerisms take the place of real character traits. The aforementioned Maria, for example, who is supposed to be a team manager in a position of some authority, addresses her colleagues as "babelets" and "pets," and stamps her foot when annoyed. This is a charicature, not a real person. Maria doesn't feel remotely like anyone I've ever met in any workplace.
The protagonist herself is (ostensibly) of mixed cultural heritage, overweight, and gifted with perfect photographic memory -- yet none of these details are used to add complexity or depth to her character. In fact, they barely figure in the story at all. What I found even more frustrating to read was the fact that Anjuli O'Connell is indecisive, feeble, and unassertive, and spends more time thinking rebellious thoughts than actually voicing them.

Is Silver Screen a comedy, techno-thriller, or pastiche? The tone of the novel swings wildly between these possibilities. Consider this passage: "...maybe the impact of his death had not really hit. Death felt more dreary and sullen than I did. It became lethargic and careless and didn't wash its hair from one week to the next." The narrator, here, is grieving the apparent suicide of one of her best friends. But the fey prose style only draws attention to the author and away from the story she's telling. Such self-indulgence makes it difficult to take Silver Screen seriously.

The future world in which Silver Screen is set borrows ideas about cybertechnology which were cutting edge 15 years ago, but now feel secondhand and stale. The author hasn't taken the time to develop a social reality in which to place her ideas about the future. How will having computer links implanted in our brains affect the way we live and think? Hardly at all, in this fictional world. We'll be watching black and white movies from the 1930s and 40s and eating spaghetti bolognese (despite the extravagant cost of importing fresh ingredients to the orbital space station where we'll live and work). The author doesn't seem to have exercised her imagination to the point at which she comes to inhabit the world she's created -- and as a result, Silver Screen feels like make-believe, not an alternate reality.

One of this novel's most serious flaws is the way in which the narrator addresses the readers. Anjuli O'Connell may be living in 2059, but she's self-consciously aware that her readers are living some sixty years in the past. She explains to us (in rather tedious detail) the historical events and technological advances which have taken place between our time and hers, to fill us in on what we've missed. It would have been more clever -- and more interesting to read -- if Anjuli O'Connell had addressed us as though we were her contemporaries, au fait with the latest technology and social trends of 2059. That this literary conceit didn't occur to the author seems to indicate a lack of familiarity with the science fiction genre.

The ending of this novel (which I won't spoil for other readers by revealing) leaves several story threads hanging and muddies the resolution by throwing in last-minute developments which weren't foreshadowed in the plot. "Shall I leave cryptic clues, omit the important part? Shall I tell it all, like a cheap tart on an afternoon chatfest who can't get enough of the camera.... Do I want to be fully understood or only to hint at what I might mean?" This is one of Silver Screen's characters talking, but he could be describing the process by which this novel was written.

When Roy Croft kills himself, O'Connell is forced to remember the strange half-friendship that she had most of her life with the crazed genious. However, his death never allows for any closure, because Roy seems to have started something before he died. The book features the standard sci fi plots-- anarchist hackers, AI rights, strange mental abilities, and questions about the boundary of being human.

It wasn't per se bad, this book, but I found very little about it that really stood out. It seemed as if Robson did a very good survey of the Cyberpunk and sci fi genres and turned out a book to formula. Uninspired, but readable if you're bored.

...or so the book should have been called. Admittedly, I did buy this book because it did look like it followed similar ideas to William Gibson's brilliant "Neuromancer", but what I did not expect was to read a book that ripped off all Gibson's ideas. In fact, I was amazed at how blatant some of the stolen ideas were. For example, in Neuromancer there is a scene where Case watches Moly's progress on a dangerous mission through her eyes with the help of computer implants. In Silver Screen, Anjuli watches Augustine's progress on a dangerous mission through his eyes with the help of computer implants. And there are more similarities, I won't even begin to draw comparisons between Wintermute and the Shoal, but if you have read Neuromancer, get ready for deja vu when reading this.

As a direct comparison to Neuromancer, this book doesn't measure up. Silver Screen is far less intriguing or exciting as Gibson's dark vision of the future. By itself, it is slightly intriguing, but I found my mind wandering off as I was reading - the characters themselves didn't appeal to me greatly and I found trouble in caring about what happened to them.

To sum up, this novel didn't hold my interest to greatly because it was similar to the great sci-fi classic "Neuromancer" and the characters didn't appeal to me.