Virus

Rating:
Summary: Believe it or not
Review: A great book to read.

Indeed, Graham Watkins has braught us to the future.

With all the Y2K around us, his story is indeed a great true and original script.

So why the four stars? The rapid going book brings us to a falling end. The book ends too quickly and with no more room to be mistaken, the writer was eager to end it, so he ended it. I would have preferred the end to end alternetavilly. The human race should not always win.

Rating:
Summary: Very Realistic and an Excellent Novel
Review: I am currently reading the book and am more than half way done with it. This is by far one of the best books I have ever read. It is very descriptive in details and has very realistic characters. The book makes you think that the characters are real and the story really took place. This is a page-turner that will be so enjoyable to read that you won't be able to put down until you finish it.

Rating:
Summary: It will happen!
Review: This book can certainly not be compared with anything Robin Cook wrote. It is a different dimension. Cook wrote really weak novels and this novel is anything but weak. With the millenium bug approaching the scenario in this novel seems to be very realistic, and I think it is only a matter of time until something like that happens. We have enough crooks sitting in front of computers and there are enough "intelligent" software programs being processed at the moment, we can be sure some time there will be a disaster. The novel has its small flaws though. It is only readable for people who know computers. Maybe it would be much more interesting to people who do not know computers. And the side plot Mark - Alex is simply unnecessary. The motivation is wrong and it does not in any way promote the meaning or even the speed of the novel. Sometimes less can be more! But certainly, it is a good and suspensful read, if not a page turner. Definitely not a Robin Cook!

Rating:
Summary: It will happen!
Review: Watkins recreates the Good Times virus, but instead of merely deleting your hard drive, it KILLS you. And you can get it just by reading a text file! Horrors!

The characters themselves were not bad, but I was unable to get past the egregious technical flaws. Specifically: the AI program can function on a 486, and the full package takes up only 50M on disk. In return for this, it can do 10:1 compression on video data, interact in real time with the user, and optimize all of the programs on the hard drive. Further, it can infect a new machine using a plain text email message.

Had the author merely had a deadly program that, when installed, caused addiction via flicker epilepsy, this would have been a forgivable technical decision. People would have noticed the effects, but we would not have been subjected to page after page of the supposed AI creating impossible technologies, all explained away with a casual "we do not know how it is doing it."

Sigh.

If you are going to write a novel where a computer virus is a major plot element, find a competent technical advisor who can tell you what the limitations are.