Mir. The Russian word for "peace," for "one world." Mir 3.0 is the code name for a piece of neural software that can change the world. And it's escaped carrying a virus that is hell-bent on doing just that.
The year is 2036 and the world is in the grip of a new cold war. The Berlin Wall is back up and concentration camps have been recreated. It is an eerily familiar conflict with a chilling new twist -- this is a battle for control of cyberspace and the Wall and the camps are both of the virtual variety. It's a time when epidermal programming is the cutting-edge fetish among the fringe dwellers of the hacker underworld. These epidermal programs are sentient tattoos that can travel on-line and perform tasks for their owners on the Net. They can even move from body to body in forbidden techno-pagan rituals.
Now the Mir virus is on the loose, traveling as a passenger on the tattoos. Like the tattoos, Mir can migrate from consciousness to consciousness, from body to body, from individuals to entire nations, both off-line and on-line. No one, nothing, is safe in its deadly path.
Trevor Gobi, son of the legendary virtual reality investigator Frank Gobi, is on the trail of Mir. His girlfriend Nelly has become infected through a tattoo, a tattoo that assumes a phantasmic form of its own as it incubates on her body. as it threatens her very existence -- and the entire World Wide Net.
Mir is the second novel in the Rim Trilogy. The first, Rim, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and described as "a book destined to become a classic" by Paul Saffo, director of the Institute of the Future. National Public Radio's Moira Gunn called it "incredibly compelling with its mix of technology and metaphysics, human consciousness, and virtual reality."
In Mir, Besher presents a startlingly complete and daunting vision of a future where the on-line, virtual life has become fully as real and crucial to everyone's survival as mundane reality. It is a wildly imaginative, frighteningly believable thriller that is guaranteed to join Neuromancer and Snow Crash as defining paradigms of the cyberfuture.
Amazon.com Review: Ultimately a love story--or what Alexander Besher calls more accurately a love triangle between a boy, a girl, and her tattoo--Mir manages to be both serious and silly cyberpunk. This tense, believable thriller still manages to make "robotics"/"raw buttocks" jokes. Trevor Gobi, the son of Rim's protagonist Frank Gobi, is tracking down Mir, a devastating virus that has infected his girlfriend Nelly (through her sentient tattoo Sinbad) and that threatens to crash both the virtual and "real" world. Not quite the tight read Rim was, Mir still succeeds thanks to the sheer volume of Besher's imagination. --Paul Hughes
Not Free SF Reader A cyberpunk book of the slightly later variety. Live tattoos, jokes, and others. How do you feel if your girlfriend only loves you for you tatts?
A bit of espionage, industrial and otherwise, computer virus smuggling, dodgy underworld, dodgy characters, and more abound.
Think sort of a Charlie Stross or Ken Macleod flavour for the general tone. Probably a 3.25 this one.
a sloppy juxtaposition of good ideas The author is excellently descriptive, I enjoyed many of the author's imaginative ideas (sentient tattoos, Hail A Lama taxis, etc.), and enjoyed his obvious love for the Bay Area (obvious echos of Philip K Dick's love for the same). However his ideas were possibly too fruitful often colliding with each other rather then meshing, leaving the story line in tatters.
The concept of the "Hail A Lama" taxi cabs were a stroke a brilliance that could be the basis for an entire novel. However in MIR it is only given a quickly discarded backstory and then used as impersonal plot continuation device. The character's backstories were often just as rashly introduced in brief flashbacks only to be basically ignored. Thus leaving the characters feeling as if they were only hollow pivot points for a runaway plot. By the end of the book I was reading fairly quickly and mainly only to get it over with -- not that the ending was really worth it anyway.
I think the book was great but... I loved the book, but I think that Besher needs to work on the ending. It just sorta ends, there isn't much to it. All in all the book was excelent, and I would recomend it to anyone.
Buddhist-cyberpunk and virtual reality in the 21st century Epidermal programming is a cutting edge fetish. Sentient tatoos and the Mir 3.0 virus are loose in a world that exists both in consciousness and physical form -- and techno-pagan rituals can assist in moving both from body to body.
Original, intelligent, expansive and truly entertaining. The author is creating an epic story arc that is sure to become a classic. Highly recommended for those who can use a bit of altered reality!
Not as good as RIM While I did not dislike the book. Beshers second novel seems to have lost some of the edge apparent in the first.
All the elements are there, a cyberpunk/buddist setting, a deadly virus that could destroy the world and a few attempting to fight against it. However after a good start the plot seems to meander and the frequent jumps from character to character and in and out of various sub plots that Besher makes can lead to confusion on the part of the reader. I am going to go back to it a second time and feel that it may then grow on me but at the moment I can only say that it is readable but nothing special.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
