William Gibson's cyberspace was an urban-hacker power fantasy, dark yet transcendent, like a bad drug trip. The Extremes, by British novelist Christopher Priest, upsets that paradigm with a distinctly suburban virtual reality. There are no hackers - just a vibrantly human female protagonist using VR in her search for peace of mind.
Teresa Simons is an FBI agent, happily married until her husband is killed by a mass murderer in Texas. Trying to exorcise her grief, Simons journeys to the sleepy British town of Bulverton, where, by coincidence, a mad gunman staged a massacre on the same day her husband was shot. In fact, Simons' husband was working on a proj-ect to analyze and predict the behavior of murderers - until he got himself killed. Simons herself makes a meticulous, methodical study of Bulverton, but she is frustrated by uncommunicative witnesses and contradictory testimony.
She's haunted, also, by her ambivalence toward guns, rooted in a mysterious childhood accident when she "killed" an imaginary playmate by firing a handgun from her father's collection. She wonders if the playmate could have been a real child whose murder was concealed, somehow, by her parents. Or was the other girl an image of Teresa Simons herself in a mirror? She will never know for sure.
In Bulverton, Simons replays the massacre as a virtual reality experience; she uses a commercially available service in this near future that involves preprogrammed chips attached internally to the nervous system. Gradually Simons becomes personally involved, to the point where she loses her tenuous grip on reality.
The novel's binary relationships imply a logical pattern, but those who try to decode it only fail. Priest's take-home message seems to be that some events are so traumatic, we'll never come to terms with them, no matter how many times we rerun the tragedies in the virtual world. Some readers may find this antirational and dissatisfying, contrary to the problem-solving spirit of science fiction. But this novel doesn't try to be science fiction. It uses VR merely as a means to demonstrate, vividly and compassionately, our limits as human beings when confronted with modern-day experiences that are inhumanly extreme.
The Extremes by Christopher Priest: $24.95. St. Martin's Press: +1 (212) 982 3900.
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