By: Larry Niven, Steven Barnes Publisher: Ace Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Ace Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 448 Publication Date: July 15, 1986 Release Date: March 25, 2003
Product Description: For fifteen virtual reality gamers undertaking a four-and-half day quest, the fantasy slaying of monsters is suddenly interrupted-by murder.
Fun concept, cool story, lame conclusion Think about your favorite role-playing adventure game. As a warrior, cleric, magician, or thief, you can leave your humdrum life behind for a while, pick up a new persona and some multi-faceted dice and embark on a heart-pounding adventure. Now imagine a place where you could go to play out this kind of fantasy in "real life" - following clues, reading terrain, planning battles, running, screaming, and swinging your weapon for all you're worth. Welcome to Dream Park - Niven and Barnes' perhaps-not-so-futuristic getaway resort. Using a combination of animatronics, live actors, holograms, and computer-aided design, Dream Park's Gamemasters allow their well-heeled patrons to participate in the adventure of a lifetime in relative safety. The ruling gaming society assigns points for successful missions, and a good time is had by all, until one day a murder inside the park causes security chief Griffin to personally enter a game in hopes of determining which player is the killer.
The Dream Park itself is one heck of a fun concept, and results in a reasonably good story, although it should be admitted that the book's conclusion is scarcely short of pitiful. There's no longer much that's science fictiony here, because most of the technology described in this book is now actually available - expensive, perhaps. So while what we get is a role-playing adventure game with all the swashbuckling trimmings and the added distraction of a real-life murder mystery, the murder's resolution is so hopelessly contrived that it would have ruined the book if we hadn't stopped caring about it many pages earlier. On the other hand, the gaming side of the story is far more realistic, and loads more entertaining. The gamers themselves are a motley bunch, with some fairly cool characters among them, and they keep the story interesting even when the action slows down.
This is a must-read for anyone into rpg's, and a good introduction to the whole Dream Park concept, but not really an outstanding novel on its own. Interested readers can return to Dream Park in two sequels, The Barsoom Project (which is rather pedestrian, kind of a Dream Park Lite) and the California Voodoo Game (which is really pretty good).
A classic SF read One of my favorite SF books of all time.... A fun, fast read with a fascinating background concept. My favorite Niven book - far better (to my mind) than Ringworld, and his other (harder SF) novels...
Gamers I have read and reread this book several times and have always enjoyed it. In fact, I had to tape the cover back on my paperback copy. I guess I'll need to find a new one in better condition. The one thing in this book that most people seem to miss is a paragraph on page 232. It mentions Gamers internationally playing an on line game. In 1981 that was completely impossible since no regualar civilian had any access to the World Wide Web, if it even existed. Also, the mention of flat screen monitors...once again, no such thing existed. If you have an imagination and enjoy fun fantasy, and a murder mystery thrown in, you'll enjoy this book. It's timeless.
Good Niven stuff Dream Park is a combination of a science fiction exploration of computer gaming and a murder mystery. It reads fast and kept me engaged with the story.
Basic synopsis: A disparate group of folks at a tech entertainment facility join each other for the ultimate virtual reality gaming experience, and are secretly joined by a security officer investigating a murder that happened right before the game started. As the game progresses so does the murder investigation and the danger that someone else will be killed.
I was a bit skeptical of the book at first. Especially when the adventure turned out to be a treasure hunt set in the mid 20th century. "Yawn," I thought. But it worked.
The gaming aspect is completely plausible. This is where gaming is going (at least for the very rich) if the technology can get there.
The mystery is pretty well done. The action is great.
It contains some typical Niven foibles such as: all the secretaries are female, people have more sex than can really be believed, and the dialogue is...Dragnet-esque. Someone else already mentioned a computer terminal that puts out a lot of fan-fold paper. But none of this really hurts the story. And who knows, maybe society really will return to the weird combination of chauvinism and sexual liberation described here. (I'm crediting this stuff to Niven because I recognize it in all of his work...Barnes may be the same, I just don't know.)
I recommend this for anyone not likely to get annoyed or distracted by some of the gender roles and other minor anachronisms.
An Exciting Mix of Genres Dream Park is a smart mix of near future science fiction, roleplaying gaming adventure, and mystery (with a touch of history tossed in as the basis for the gaming adventure). For roleplaying game enthusiasts, it presents a future for gaming that is quite appealing, yet quite familiar--with rivalries, meta-gaming, gamemaster/player tension, and in-character versus out-of-character comments and actions. At the same time, the historically based adventure and mystery/action elements provide an appeal and a bridge to non-gaming readers. When I first finished reading this book twenty or so years ago, my first thought was that it would make a great movie and I still believe that to be the case. I highly recommend Dream Park to all science fiction and all roleplaying fans. Donald J. Bingle, author of Forced Conversion.
Anything Goes Trivia
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