Book details of 'Night Vision'

Title	Night Vision
Author(s)	Ronald Munson
ISBN	0451180135
Language	English
Published	January 1996
Publisher	Signet

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Night Vision':

Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Writers of fiction don't tend to be highly computer literate, so I have, in my time, read an awful lot of really bad stories using technology for plot devices. I don't think, however, that even completely formularized series books such as "Eye of the Storm" live down to the level of this one in terms of both abdication of any literary merit, and complete disregard of the realities of technical possibility. The characters strain credibility. There is the gorgeous and athletic heroine who wanted to be a biologist, reads scientific biographies for recreation, but became an actress to please her mother. (The biology lessons mustn't have gone very far since it takes her a while to figure out that she is in the animal research lab that she was told about a few chapters ago.) Our courageous psychiatrist is a former surgeon who sharpened his anatomical skills by playing jackstraws with autopsy knives (it's *amazing* how closely akin they are to throwing knives) and full body anatomical charts. Our evil super-genius hacker is also an electronic stalker and, just so that you know how vile he is, both a consumer and producer of necro-porn. (This "mastermind" tends to do little advance planning, and also seems to be about as stupid as two bags of rocks.) Inconsistencies in the behaviour of the villains are not a problem, since they are all, clinically speaking, bonkers. (Just to level the intellectual playing field, here, once our heroes have narrowed the number of baddies to one, and all the hostages are either safe or dead, do they walk out and leave the cleanup to the police? Nooooo!) Would you build a facility for treating VIPs with depression or panic disorders and have no windows in the building? No, I didn't think so. A policeman, on the basis of a rather tentative personal acquaintance, outfits a (somewhat disabled) civilian with weaponry of slightly questionable legality, and sends him off to do battle with the black hats. Alone. In the midst of a sizeable and quite public police operation. You expect me to believe that this building has VIP suites in one part, animal research in another, and only one door? So they truck the bags of Purina Rat Chow in (and the, umm, ... end products ... out) through the main foyer? Actually, while the labryinthian insides of the building are truly mind boggling, this business of the structure having only one door, crucial to the early part of the book, turns out to be very much not the case after all. A laser, especially a lab standard argon laser, is not a good weapon. Although you could probably give someone a nasty lump if you hit them with it. Standard cable run channelling is far too small for anyone, even an anorexic model or actress, to fit through. If you are moving feet first through a passage just barely big enough for your body to fit into, it isn't likely that too many cobwebs are going to be left after you pass by. And someone squirming their way through a duct of galvanized sheet metal is going to make one heck of a racket. Well, enough with the fairly easy problems with the book. Let's get on with the technical mistakes. The modems used in the book are all the old acoustic coupler type. It's been a very long time since I used them, but I can never recall anyone having to use talcum powder to get the cups to fit over handsets. One scene suggests that there is a difficulty with the acoustic coupler and a non-500 (the old standard rotary dial desk set) handset. This is partly why the later acoustic couplers used flatter pickups, and why portable computers now tend to use cellular modems. (Aside from the fact that acoustic couplers generally didn't go beyond the Bell 103 standard 300 bits per second.) (In this particular scene it is also hard to figure out where the phone comes from: eventually I decided that it must have been a car phone in the rental van.) The "hacking" scenes have just enough techie jargon to ensure that they make no sense at all. I can't recall precisely when the last BITNET nodes switched over, but I think it was before this book was written. In any case, BITNET was definitely not the same as Usenet. Also, a bang path was hardly a way to disguise the originating node. But that's OK, since turning off all the phones and truly spoofing the email address would leave the authorities with no way to reply to the gang. The "social engineering" described in the book is pathetic, and the "shoulder surfing" problematic. COMMTALK, as far as I can recall, is a text based terminal emulation program. I must have missed the transformation that got it Internet telephony and video capability. And I must admit that I was amazed at how well outfitted the police were, being able to transmit an Internet video signal from a regular crime scene. Everyone who connects to the Internet, regardless of computer, provider, or software, sees a countdown on their screen? I'll have to look up the RFC for UDMP (Universal Doomsday Message Protocol). The police would be able to shut down power to the building, regardless of the internal control. A research lab, or a medical facility, might have an internal backup power supply, but it would be limited. Filename extensions are used for customer identification rather than data types. CAD (Computer Aided Design, or probably Drafting, in this case) is done on a mainframe. While wasteful, in this day of high end workstations, this is barely possible. What probably isn't possible is accessing those files in a useful form without a specialized terminal. Also, CAD is used to find out precise details of the building, but in order to find another exit you just go for a stroll around the place. The idea of using CAD files for a virtual reality walkthrough is good, as is the idea of using gaming to impress facts into the mind, but the type of gaming actually used in the book is pretty much guaranteed to distract the user from learning architectural niceties. A computer controlling building security is readily accessible from an outside line. The programmed threat in the book is one that will take down the telephone network. There is a correct assessment of some network related problems, but saying that every net connected computer will crash is going a bit too far. A dewar flask full of liquid nitrogen produces enough mist, from boiling nitrogen and condensing water vapour, that you cannot see the liquid itself. It does not produce enough mist to fog a room. I wouldn't recommend swimming in it, but you can plunge portions of your body in liquid nitrogen for brief periods with no ill effects. (I've done it.) The specific heat of nitrogen is low enough that an enormous amount will boil away without seriously chilling tissue at body temperature. On the other hand, if you do freeze tissue solid, the nitrogen does not combine with oxygen in the tissues, and certainly doesn't explode. This is the kind of book that gives reviewers a reputation for never liking anything. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999
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