Book details of 'Death Dream'

Title	Death Dream
Author(s)	Ben Bova
ISBN	0553572563
Language	English
Published	September 1995
Publisher	Bantam Books

---

Back to shelf Fiction
Amazon.com info for Death Dream

Score:

Vote for this book

The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Death Dream':

Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Viruses, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality are the mainstays of the thriller world, where it touches on technology at all. This book uses, and abuses, VR. I am willing to accept high resolution imagery, and short latency times. I am willing to accept that vision, sound, and minor physical sensations can have an impact out of all proportion to reality. (Wanna know how Disney forces you into your seat when you take off on a rocket? The base of the seat sinks. You really feel like you are rising. Maybe more like an elevator than a rocket, but you really seem to move.) I am less willing to accept that this makes a simulation so indistinguishable from reality that you have to ask your wife for a password. I have a hard time accepting the undefined but non-intrusive means of generating specific physical sensations. Not only is this well beyond the technology that we have available now, but even with physical probes the ability to stimulate a particular tactile response (or any other, really) is very much a hit and miss affair. (To be strictly fair, the book does allow that this requires some brain mapping, and does not transfer accurately from person to person.) (Oh, and by the way, someone who is aphasic from a stroke probably would be paralysed on the right side of the body. I have both professional and personal reasons for knowing this.) I am much less willing to accept that a team of technicians, looking for faults in equipment, cannot recognize a transmitter of some sort where none should be. I am little short of astounded that a primarily visual simulation system has no external monitors. However, I am willing to forgive all of this, given the extremely important point that is central to this book. Presentation of information, in our age, has become more important than content. Control of information shapes, and may cripple, leaders and governments. The hand that holds the clicker may well rule the world. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998
Add my review for Death Dream