Kelly Mitchell (1)

In a future run by shadowy superintelligent AIs and megacorporations, Karl is a young man with extraordinary abilities and a mysterious past. It seems he was created for a purpose ... but what? When the power brokers of this world, including several AIs with near-godlike powers, start taking an interest in him, Karl has to figure out what it is that he's supposed to do -- and whom to trust, and whom to betray.

This is the murky, paranoid world of Wildcard (who is apparently the cybergod to end all cybergods). Suffused by a kind of mental claustrophobia, because all the powers are holding back information from Karl and each other. As they make alliances and break them, cooperating and betraying, their deeper motives become revealed like the layers of an onion. Almost all the players are genetically engineered and/or cybernetically enhanced: the foster mother who cares for Karl; the matched set of the General and the Sergeant, meshing strategy and tactics; various other bio and cyber experts; and three world-spanning AIs who fear each other almost as they fear Wildcard (for whatever reason).

There's also a single outsider: a mestizo shaman who was raised by wolves in the Mexican desert. In the best cyberpunk tradition, the mystic uses his very different viewpoint to solve problems that the others cannot (compare to Gibson's use of religious or magical motifs in Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive).

The plot is dense with politics and stratagems, and the world includes a whole series of diverse cyberspaces. One is called simply Mansworld, a fairly accurate reproduction of the human environment, but most of the others are bizzare or flatly incomprehensible to humans. Traveling to them and through them can be a harrowing ordeal. The imagery is lush and imaginative, and the mood is dark and dystopian. This book embodies the classic cyberpunk tradition, and it's only the first book of a series. I'm looking forward to more.… (altro)