Wilson: SIMS - Not Your PC Sims World
COMPELLING
F. Paul Wilson fluctuates between speculative "hard" sci-fi (Enemy of the State, The Tery) and fantasy of the type to which Stephen King used to set his pseudonym (The Tomb, Nightworld). SIMS belongs to the former category.
Wilson has put together current science—the growth of knowledge about human and other genomes, gene splicing and cloning—with the likely moral, religious and ethical questions that might rise from their use to create a subhuman labor force, the sims, and label them leased product rather than slave. Creation of this product fueled the rise of a corporate giant, SimGen, dwarfing even Microsoft. Power generated by the monopoly over an essential low-cost labor force has protected SimGen from scrutiny.
Then Patrick Sullivan, an ambulance-chaser of a labor negotiator, is approached by one of the sims for help in forming a labor union. What he learns in the process will expose a secretive government agency, change public opinion (and his own) about the meaning of "humanity", and open wide the secret of the sims.
WARNING: Don't start this book on Sunday evening—if you do, you may have to call in sick Monday to finish it!
SIMS won the Libertarian Futurist Society's Prometheus Award for 2004. The review at another site is not signed, but I must agree with the reviewer about how hard it is to put down.
F. Paul Wilson fluctuates between speculative "hard" sci-fi (Enemy of the State, The Tery) and fantasy of the type to which Stephen King used to set his pseudonym (The Tomb, Nightworld). SIMS belongs to the former category.
Wilson has put together current science—the growth of knowledge about human and other genomes, gene splicing and cloning—with the likely moral, religious and ethical questions that might rise from their use to create a subhuman labor force, the sims, and label them leased product rather than slave. Creation of this product fueled the rise of a corporate giant, SimGen, dwarfing even Microsoft. Power generated by the monopoly over an essential low-cost labor force has protected SimGen from scrutiny.
Then Patrick Sullivan, an ambulance-chaser of a labor negotiator, is approached by one of the sims for help in forming a labor union. What he learns in the process will expose a secretive government agency, change public opinion (and his own) about the meaning of "humanity", and open wide the secret of the sims.
WARNING: Don't start this book on Sunday evening—if you do, you may have to call in sick Monday to finish it!
SIMS won the Libertarian Futurist Society's Prometheus Award for 2004. The review at another site is not signed, but I must agree with the reviewer about how hard it is to put down.
posted by DrPat at 12/06/2004 06:35:00 PM
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