Extremes

by Christopher Priest

Book Overview

FBI Agent Teresa Simons specializes in investigating mass murder and serial killings. Part of her training requires her to participate in extremely lifelike virtual reality scenarios that are almost... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312205414
• ISBN13: 9780312205416
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Virtually real

I picked this up by chance at a bookstore, never heard of the author prior. I was about 50 pages in when I recalled I had originally found it in the SF section. Where was the science fiction part of the story? This was starting out as just a good novel, cleanly written, with a great eye for insignificant detail that helps flesh out the tale. Having read SF throughout most of my reading career, I know most of it is plot driven with characters and settings just used to push along the nifty story. This book takes its time (luxuriates?) developing the main character, Teresa Simons, a real woman who adapts within character to the unfolding events. Its done so well I assumed the author was a woman. (He's not). She has grown up in England, the daughter of a career US military man,becomes an FBI agent, and one day loses her husband in a random spree massacre. This is the kind of SF I need now and then, maybe the best kind; where the whole story isn't techy, there is just one added element/theme to a time that could otherwise be today, ExEx. (Extreme Experience, virtual reality on steroids.) The story takes a very pleasant ramble through Teresa's' life, and from time to time she does an ExEx scenario, first for FBI training and later through a commercial provider. The iterative process she goes through to improve her performance is the most interesting of the whole book. I want this in my life for home, work and social situations. It's like the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray, where he is trapped into relieving the same day over and over again, until he eventually he gets it right. How cool would that be?? The rich, lush detail of the novel echoes the supposed detail Teresa finds in the hyper-real VR scenarios. Eventually the plot becomes complicated as she enters an ExEx scenario during which she enters an ExEx scenario....and so on. It's like looking into two mirrors reflecting each other. There were a couple of loose ends that didn't hit me until a few days after finishing. What happened to Nick and Amy, the folks who run the hotel? They just disappear from one page to the next after they sell their stories. Also, what is up with the execs from GunHo corp? They make a big splashy extrance and then they too exit stage right. I'm sure its all in here, I'm just too used to obvious plot points. Oh well, I'll pay more attention when I read it again.So here's the question you'll have to solve: Does the whole story take place inside an ExEx, or does she only choose at the end to avoid "real" reality without her dead husband by staying permanently in a scenario? Many books compell me to race through them to see what happens next. This made me keep coming back to enjoy spending a little more time with Teresa.

Whew!

I am certainly surprised that some of the previous reviewers found this book dull. I found it to be that rarest of books for me--a genuine page-turner! Priest understands that reality is a construct of our minds based on sensory input. The consequences, then, of all-encompassing virtual reality are worked out in this fine and exciting novel. Don't miss it if you think you might enjoy a novel that is easy to read but challenging in its concepts.

Brilliant and disturbing

Christopher Preist writes stories that are on the fringe of science fiction. Calling him an SF writer is too limiting - he is a writer with imagination, who writes stories that stretch the limits of imagination.This novel focuses on one character's virtual reality experiences. I won't bother to tell the story - another reviewer already did that. What stands out is this book, though, is the way the plot folds over and over, until the reader loses touch with reality.I say this is a disturbing book as well - when I was reading it, I found it so skewed that I could only read a few paragraphs at a time. I had to stop and do something else for a few minutes, to anchor myself, before coming back to it. Nevertheless, I read it in one day.This book incites a kind of subconscious itch, a discomfort that arises from not knowing what reality the characters is in. A brilliant work, along the same line as The Prestige, with its multiple realities.In the end, this novel shows that the book is the ultimate virtual reality device. Preist's mastery of a complex plot leads the reader down dark paths to dead-ends, before finally coming to a totally unexpected resolution.Great work, Chris.

Intriguing novel about Virtual Reality and violence

Christopher Priest is one of the best SF writers around, and he seems much less well-known in the US than perhaps he should be. He made quite an early splash with books like Fugue for a Darkening Island and The Inverted World, and with short stories like the remarkable "An Infinite Summer." His later books (such as The Affirmation, The Glamour, and most recently The Prestige) have been typically on the boundary between SF and the mainstream, which perhaps accounts for the diminished notice he has received within the American SF field. His newest novel, The Extremes, published in 1998 in the UK and just now coming out in the US, is also on that boundary, and it's another good one. Teresa Simons is an FBI agent married to another agent. When her husband is killed in Kingwood City, Texas, trying to capture a serial killer, Teresa, recovering, ends up travelling to England where she was born. She visits a seaside town named Bulverton where another serial killer went on a rampage the same day Teresa's husband was killed.In Bulverton, Amy Colwyn and Nick Surtees are trying to make a go of Nick's parents' hotel/pub, which Nick inherited when his parents were murdered by the killer who also killed Amy's husband. However, neither knows much about running a hotel, nor is it what they really want from life, and their dissatisfaction is affecting their rekindled relationship.So, Teresa comes to Nick and Amy's hotel. She tries interviewing the locals, trying to come to an understanding of their reactions to the serial killings in their town, but she doesn't make much headway. She ends up spending her time in a Virtual Reality simulation called Extreme Experience, something she also used in her FBI training, but in this case reviewing VR tapes of the Bulvertion murders.So far, this is a fairly straightforward near-mainstream novel. It's apparently set right about present time, and Priest has inserted the unlikely virtual reality technology as if it exists now. The scenes in ExEx are well done, believable and scary, and comment on our fascination with violence -- and to some extent on our complicity with it -- subtly, without lecturing. The writing is excellent, and the characters are fairly well drawn, although Teresa did a couple of things that I didn't quite buy.Ah, but this is Christopher Priest. Anyone who has read a lot of Priest, especially, say, his very fine early novel A Dream of Wessex (aka The Perfect Lover), won't be terribly shocked at the direction The Extremes takes towards the end. Priest seems fascinated with reality and how our consciousness creates our reality, and as such could hardly be expected to resist the temptation presented by a subject such as extremely realistic VR simulations. His speculations here jump off the extrapolation track a bit, in my opinion, but they are fascinating, and the ending of this novel takes on a certain logic of its own. It's moving and interesting, and well construc

Entertaining police procedural with a nightmarish IT future

Two individuals, operating alone, simultaneously killed many innocent bystanders. One of them murdered his victims in Texas while the other did his vile deed in England. Among the victims in America was the spouse of FBI agent Teresa Simons, an expert in using the virtual reality program ExEx to reconstruct the crimes. After investigating the Texas incident, Teresa travels to Bulverton, the site of the English incident. She plans to sue ExEx in order to find the link between the incidents because she knows that coincidence is astronomically remote in these cases. However, the corporate world does not want her uncovering potential negative feedback loops that could destroy their investment in ExEx and will treat her like a virus that needs eradication before she obliterates their investment. Award winning author Christopher Priest (see THE PRESTIGE) writes a nightmarish look at information technology that will simply keep readers away from their keyboard just as "Jaws" kept people away from the beaches. The story line is clearly plot-driven as Mr. Priest extrapolates a possible future reality based on current information technology trends. The communication revolution may be upon us, but Mr. Priest paints it as an ugly and destructive weapon. THE EXTREMES is an extremely well written, non-stop entertaining novel.Harriet Klausner