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- The War Bug
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- Author: Biff Mitchell
- Reviewer: Rita Porter
- Publisher: Double Dragon Publishing, Inc., Markham, Ontario, Canada
- Format: Adult, Fiction, e-book, 286 pages, 2004, $5.99
- ISBN: B0001ZYOOW
- Rating: * * * * Quills
- www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/B0001ZYOOW/scriquil
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- In the dawn of the computer age, many inventors came up with different programs, not all of which were benign ones. Some were designed specifically to destroy a company's complete computer system, such as the war bug, programmed to be set free in the company's system the minute the termination code was handed down. One hundred and fifty years later, this becomes a reality.
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- With the computer knowledge gained in the intervening hundred and fifty years, computerized worlds and laws for virtual reality lives within those worlds have been created. One inventor has created a computerized bubble to store his virtual family in. But something is starting to go wrong in the virtual reality worlds. Places are starting to disappear, just fading into blackness with everything within just blanking out. No one knows why or how. What is happening to everyone’s families that they have created? Will they all be just gone, or can someone save them?
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- The War Bug is a mix of science fiction and fantasy, utilizing computers, scientists, knowledge inventors and several futuristic programs. The high mix of characters, floating through this story, all headed on a collision course, makes for a very nice fast-paced plot builder to carry its reader along its twisting path.
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- Abner Hayes has built and written a special coded virtual world for his VP family, something unheard of in his time of existence a hundred and fifty years into the future. Having forgone the normal standard VP family, Abner has written sentient VP code and modeled his VP family after it. Bella and her cohorts are after this program, going to any means to get to it. Bella craves everlasting VP life and hires Jeemo to ferret out the information for her. He is most willing to help her in her quest, because his desire for her type of pleasure is a life goal for him. All this must be accomplished just as the VP world is ceasing to exist server by server. No one knows the cause of this.
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- The computer age has grabbed us up in its palm. In The War Bug, Biff Mitchell takes advantage of the way society interacts with computers. Writing about something most people have a little knowledge of and about their fears of not having their servers being available all the time, increases the sense of an online life. The virtual reality work and the friends across the miles makes this a capable modern science fiction read.
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- I liked the way the story played out. It had a lot of give and take throughout, letting the reader follow along without an in-depth description of things those not accustomed to computers to get lost by. Cyberspace can be overwhelming to people who haven't a clue what computer users speak about. However, Mitchell did well in the way he brought all types of readers together, those who know some and those who don't know anything about computers.
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