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Susan DiPlacido, author of Trattoria and 24/7
So. What do cheese soup, sentient virtual reality beings, and a seven-hundred pound sado-masochist have to do with each other? Pick up The War Bug and unlock the mysteries. Part sci-fi, part action adventure, and plenty of dark humor is what Biff Mitchell weaves together, along with his eclectic and electric cast in his latest offering.
Abner Hayes is Virtual Code Geneticist, where he works online studying DNA codes of plants and animals and then simulating them
offline. However, his offline world is a drag. He's alone, he lives in a hovel, and his parents have already been "included", which Abner fears will also someday happen to him. Especially if his secret
about his online life is to ever leak out. Because online, he has a beautiful wife and daughter. They are not avatars from the real world like he is, nor are they flat coded programs. His wife Claire and daughter
Cassie are the only two online entities to have made the leap from programs to sentient, thinking and feeling, beings. However, their time is limited because the 'net is under siege and ready to collapse. Abner has
created a bubble protection for his family, but they've been abducted by some sinister forces who've figured out his secret and want to unlock it for themselves. The only way to save his family is to team up with
the deadly, ultimate destruction virus, known as The War Bug, to find and rescue his family before the entire world crumbles to oblivion.
Thrills and chills abound as the clock ticks down and the race is on for Abner to save his family. This is a rich and complex world,
but Mitchell makes it wholly comprehensible without ever losing momentum. In his signature style, the satire and laughs are woven throughout, along with a plethora of zinging one-liners and unique descriptions. The
characters are rich and varied, fully-fleshed and wholly intriguing. The good guys have edges, the bad guys have allure. And even amid the brewing chaos in this strange landscape, the story flies so high and
resonates because it's so very human.
It's rare that a novel can so thoroughly capture the mind, heart, and imagination. Biff Mitchell is a blessed breed of writer who
mixes the real, surreal, and potentially real by fusing philosophy, science, human emotions, humor, and terror. And The War Bug is this writer at the top of his game.
Barry Hunter in Baryon Magazine 95
Imagine if you will a computer crafted on a strand of DNA that is able to store all the information that is available today and is
also able to process any problem in hardly any time at all. The creator of this commits suicide and the computer is lost for 150 years. Yang Yin rediscovers the DNA Bubble Computer and when he is "screwed"
by the marketing group, he unleashes a program to exact his revenge.
Fifty years later, Abner Hayes has taken the DNA computer and used it to create a world wherein he has created a family and enabled
them with life that may be immortal. Bella Bjork, the richest person in the world wants the secret of immortality and will do anything to get it.
The only problems are that not everyone is as sane as they need to be and a rogue program, THE WAR BUG, that was introduced by Yang
Yin to destroy the net at a future date.
Mitchell has taken a very unusual cast and given the internet a twist to give us a look at a future that may not be what we expect.
This is an interesting and unusual book that deserves more than a passing glance. Give it a try.
William Koonce in BookBanter Book Club
Well written and fast paced. Plot somewhat set in a “Matrix” world. Very entertaining.
Patricia Spork in eBook Reviews Weekly
Two-hundred years in the future, nanotechnology is at its peak, although research still commences. Humans not only live and work in
the real world, but also live and work online as virtual beings interacting with software programs. Abner Hayes, a Virtual Code Geneticist, prefers living in this virtual world. Using DNA coding, he's illegally
created the first sentient programs - Claire, his wife, and Cassie, his teenage daughter.
Unbeknownst to Abner, immortal life is sought by Bella Bjork, a beautiful perverted sex-monger and murderer. She teams with genius
programmer Jeemo Roosenvelt, a seven-foot, 700-pound sado-masochist, who seeks to break the coding of Abner's sentient programs.
But the Net is falling apart as war rages between online cities, placing Claire and Cassie in life-threatening danger. So Abner's
created the world's smallest bubble computer as a sanctuary for his beloved virtual family until a new Net is developed. But before he can transfer his family's programs to the bubble computer, Claire and Cassie
disappear.
As Abner searches online for Claire and Cassie, he meets the War Bug, a conniving virus behind the Net's degeneration. The War Bug, at
a steep price, offers his assistance to find Claire and Cassie. But can this destructive virus and Abner save them before the Net completely crumbles, or before Jeemo fragments and deletes them all?
Biff Mitchell does a stunning job pulling a reader into his virtual world. Characters are honely carved and dialogue spiced with dark
humor. Love and deceit fill the pages, as does technological intrigue and adventuresome thrills. To me, the ending is set up for a sequel, which I'd enjoy reading if ever written and published. So I highly recommend
"The War Bug" by Biff Mitchell to Science Fiction fans who can stomach sexual perversion, grotesque humor, and total cyber satire.
Charlene Austin at The Writers and Readers Network
Step into Biff Mitchell’s Matrix of virtual cities, virtual lives, human robots, and virtual avatars endowed with life. But here
there is no legendary hero to save this world from the “War Bug.”
A DNA bubble computer the size of a period at the end of a sentence that could store trillions of times all the data on earth, the
realization of what he created drove Jared over the edge. Literally. He dove over his balcony railing and broke his neck.
One-hundred-fifty years later a Virtual Code Geneticist unencrypted Jared’s encryption codes and built a working model, only to find
the Powers misuse of his CityWare intolerable. So he fixed them, Oh yeah, he fixed them.
“Fly now my Angel of Death and bring the walls crumbling down.”
And he dropped the last of the files into the folder called… “War Bug”
Fifty years later things are not going so well for the Powers. They sit in their virtual control columns making up their ridiculous
Reality Laws, and ensuring their continued power and control by “including” anyone who defies or questions that power. Injected with nanobots, anyone opposing them becomes little more than robots, puttering
around the gardens of the city rooftops. And the Powers sit in their virtual columns pointing ineffectual fingers of blame in every direction but their own while their virtual cities fall apart. Literally. All those
visiting this virtual world are dying in reality, by the millions when their online avatars are destroyed.
Abner Hayes prefers his home and family on the Net to the real world. A family he has endowed with sentient life through his own DNA
studies and coding work. Now he’s terrified. Terrified he will lose them to the viral scourge that is destroying all the online cities. Terrified he will not be able to transfer them the new bubble computer he has
created in time or intact. But not terrified enough.
One of the Powers has hired an evil, twisted programmer to discover the secret of the life Abner has given Claire and Cassie. They
don’t particularly care that they won’t be able to sustain that life, only that they rip out the secret of it before it is terminated.
Abner knows that Claire and Cassie have little time. He doesn’t have much himself. If it means working with a psychotic, rampaging
computer virus that is half the threat and appears first as a pig then a blood hound in a Sherlock Holmes outfit, well, he will do whatever it takes to ensure the survival of his wife and daughter. But will this
tool of destruction help him, or destroy them all?
Despite the animated antics of the “War Bug” this is not a virus to be trifled with, nor a trifling tale for the young or faint of
heart. It is action-packed, edge-of-your-seat, adult, science fiction drama crafted into plausible reality by a talented storyteller. Matrix fan or computer buff, science fiction fan or not, Mitchell has endowed his
characters and his world with plausibility and life that yanks you right into his imagination and into an unforgettable virtual adventure.
Rita Porter in Scribe & Quill (4 out of 4)
In the dawn of the computer age, many inventors came up with different programs, not all of which were benign ones. Some were designed
specifically to destroy a company's complete computer system, such as the war bug, programmed to be set free in the company's system the minute the termination code was handed down. One hundred and fifty years
later, this becomes a reality.
With the computer knowledge gained in the intervening 150, computerized worlds and laws for virtual reality lives within those worlds have been created. One inventor has created
a computerized bubble to store his virtual family in. But
something is starting to go wrong in the virtual reality worlds. Places are starting to disappear, just fading into blackness with everything within just blanking out. No one knows why or how. What is happening to everyone's families that they have created? Will they all be just gone, or can someone save them?
"The War Bug" is a mix of science fiction and fantasy, utilizing computers, scientists, knowledge inventors and several futuristic programs. The high mix of characters, floating through this story,
all headed on a collision course, makes for a very nice fast-paced plot builder to carry its reader along its twisting path.
Abner Hayes has built and written a special coded virtual world for his VP family,
something unheard of in his time of existence 150 years into the future. Having forgone the normal standard VP family, Abner has written sentient VP code and modeled his VP family after it. Bella and her cohorts are
after this program, going to any means to get to it. Bella craves everlasting VP life and hires Jeemo to ferret out the
information for her. He is most willing to help her in her quest, because his desire for her type of pleasure is a life goal for him. All this must be accomplished just as the VP world is ceasing to exist server by server. No one knows the cause of this.
The computer age has grabbed us up in its palm. In "The War Bug," Biff Mitchell takes advantage of the way society interacts with computers. Writing about something most people have a little
knowledge of and about their fears of not having their servers being available all the time, increases the sense of an online life. The virtual reality work and the friends across the miles makes this a capable
modern science fiction read.
I liked the way the story played out. It had a lot of give and take throughout, letting the reader follow along without an in-depth description of things those not accustomed to
computers to get lost by. Cyberspace can be overwhelming to people who haven't a clue what computer users speak about. However, Mitchell did well in the way he brought all types of readers together, those who know
some and those who don't know anything about computers.
Simon McLeish
There are two, clear, parallel trends in modern computing. One is that the virtual world is going to become more like the real one, in
the sense that it will be possible to deceive human participants into perceiving it as though it were real: like the virtual world of The Matrix, internally consistent and believeably solid, yet
containing possibilities beyond mundane physics. No illusion destroying tools like keyboards in the way; and no system failures. On the other hand, reality is becoming more like the virtual world, as
computers take over more and more (gadgets like Internet connected fridges which eliminate the need for food shopping, for example), and interfaces become smaller and more invisible and intuitive. The War Bug is set in a future in which reality and virtual reality are almost indistinguishable, in which most individuals live complex virtual lives more satisfying than their real existences, interacting with the avatars of other real people and constructed virtual personalities. There are two big hurdles, one legal, and the other technical: the Reality Laws prohibit the construction of a virtual personality which pretends to be real; and no one has yet managed to endow a virtual personality with true sentience. The plot of The War Bug concerns a man who has created a virtual family, a wife and daughter, who are somehow true people and who can convincingly persuade others of this (though Mitchell is more vague about the definition of sentience to link it to this kind of Turing Test like view; he seems to indicate more that it is the ability to carry out introspection). When his secret is discovered, all three are put in great danger from powerful people who control the online world, who want to exploit computer sentience for their own ends. At the same time, an extremely sophisticated computer virus, the War Bug, is beginning to destroy whole virtual communities - how is this, which appears to Abner as a huge pig, connected to his work and his family?
There is one immense hurdle to reading The War Bug, and that is its style. It is extremely colloquial, relentlessly
quirky and often exceptionally irritating. The prose gives the impression that it is the act of a strange stand-up comedian. It is well worth keeping going, though, and the style is reasonably
appropriate to the content. (I can see that other people would possibly find it amusing, too, but it is not a form of humour that greatly appeals to me, and as a joke it goes on far too long - a criticism I
also often feel is applicable to stand-up comedians as well.) The informality of the prose is so great that it presents something of a paradox: it is written in language so colloquial that it becomes
hard to read. The chapters are very short, and jump around a lot, which means it takes a long time to understand what is going on and to get a feel for the main characters. Some editing would have been
useful here, particularly of the background presented in the very first pages, which nearly persuaded me not to continue.
In some ways this is basically a criticism that certain aspects of this novel are not to my taste; other readers may well love
the way in which The War Bug is written. Once I did finally get into it, I found the story fascinating; it deals with philosophical ideas that have interested me for a long time, ones which could be said to be basic to the (intelligent end of) the science fiction and fantasy genres: the nature of reality, and the nature of humanity. The story suddenly becomes gripping at the point where Abner's family is kidnapped by powerful individuals who want to obtain the secret of sentience, in a way that the destruction of the virtual cities and even the deaths of thousands whose avatars were caught up in their ends had not been. Though many of the ideas are not particularly new (reference points include the obvious Gibson and Stephenson, but I felt that there was also a strong kinship with the drug induced virtual worlds of Stanislaus Lem's The
Futurological Congress), it is well done and the background shows that Mitchell is a writer with at least some ideas of his own.
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