Rating: 
Summary: get your brain in gear and take a ride
Review: you like cyber-punk and math? Read it. The first half of the book is taking you up the learning curve and then hold onto your seat......and buy the sequel SIGNAL SHATTERED at the same time, you won't want to stop .....
Rating: 
Summary: Endless trudging.
Review: I stopped reading 0.75 of the way through the book. It had periods of being really good where I'd just keep reading and reading but then there'd be these long periods about the main character's virtual reality computer hacking and blah blah blah blah blah blah. Life's too short mediocre books. Skip this and read something else.
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Summary: Nylund is a trip
Review: I used to be a unquenchable reader. 10 years ago I quit reading because I always fell asleep. Finally it dawned on me that at the age of 49 I might need glasses. I have read all 5 of Nylunds books since my wife gave me DryWater for Christmas. His books are total escapism, the words and situations are such a trip. If you have a high stress job and need to relax and escape naturally,I recomend these far out tales.I cant wait to see whats next.
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Summary: Looking Through Bubbles, Darkly
Review: This is really the type of book that I shouldn't read. With enough fear of the corporate agenda being forced down our throats right now, this book presents a dark future. The fact that most of this story takes place in VR seems to confuse at first but begins to add to the drama and intrigue of the story. My favourite part of this book is when Jack makes contact with an alien species - only to find out that the corporate hostilities on earth are going on out there in the Universe, as well. Very encouraging. A dark glimpse at a possible future. I'm glad I got the sequel, "A Signal Shattered"!
Rating: 
Summary: Signal to Noise - a few nice ideas
Review: It is easy to get into this book. Nylund's writing style is fast paced and kind of witty. Very much in the cyberpunk vein, like Gibson, but toned down alot. It's feels like a much more stable world (although it isn't supposed to be). Depending on whether you are one who enjoys the journey, or the ending, will determine what you think of this book. It's a great journey, and it does build on some great new cyber like ideas. But in the end it all starts feeling a little generic, and at the climax, all the characters remain resolved. No twists, no back stabs, no sudden awakenings. Which is kind of nice, but just don't expect a bang at the end. Well, not a literary one anyway. stepHan r. gyory
Rating: 
Summary: pulp with a cyperpunk veneer
Review: This book reads like any pulp fiction science fiction book from back in the day, rewritten with some standard cyberpunk themes: virtual reality, decaying cities, and a protagonist who is handicapped in some way (in this case, crushing threats to his career and life from the beginning of the novel). But it still retains all of the bad things that distinguish pulp from good writing, which include: poorly developed characters and therefore apparently unmotivated decisions on their part (characters here are defined by their logistical function in the plot as opposed to any real distinguishing characteristics), characters which acquire new abilities with tremendous ease (deus ex machina solutions to complications in the plot), and difficulties previously pre-established which are ignored for the sake of convenience (e.g., dialysis required for enzyme use). There is also a general unevenness with the amount of narrative explanation of the history and layout of the world portrayed here: A short description of a wall between east and west is repeated several times (as if the novel were to have appeared as a serial) without any depth being added, seemingly so that it could be used as a plot point. This novel is devoid of much non-plot-motivating fleshing out of milieu or characters. If you are looking for a novel involving cryptography, _Cryptonomicon_ by Neal Stephenson is vastly superior.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic and Absorbing
Review: This book was great! For the two days I spent reading it, it colored my world dark, multilayered and paranoid! The parallels to Philip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson are valid, but nobody mentioned Greg Bear, the ultimate destroyer of worlds. Can't wait to read the sequel!
Rating:
Summary: illiterate writing, vapid characters
Review: I bought this book (unfortunately, along with the sequel, "The signal shattered") on the strength of the Amazon reviews and the editorial blurb alone, and was severely disappointed. Nylund's degrees in chemistry and physics do not prevent him from consistently misspelling gallium arsenide (the name of an actual, not fictional, semiconductor) as "gallium arsinide," or describing a reactor that "burns" (that is, oxidizes) iron oxide (other examples of this kind abound in the book). The blurb on the inside back cover, where Nylund's science training is proudly mentioned, also states that he graduated from some kind of writing workshop. Apparently, this did not do him much good: gems such as "The files were erased. By who?" can be found on every page (by the way, about half of the sentences in the book seem to be just this long, or shorter). By the time the reader's hopes for some kind of basic scientific credibility, or at least decent English, fade, it also becomes clear that Nylund's characters are as flat as his syntactic structures. Bottom line: don't get trapped with this book on a long flight.
Rating:
Summary: more noise than signal
Review: Interesting plot premise, but I couldn't get into the style. It's not really accurate to use the phrase "hard science" anywhere in connection with this book. The prose took so much effort to establish imagery that it interfered with the narrative flow. I actually wound up skimming parts of the book in a semi-desperate attempt to see if it got any better. It didn't. Not my thing, although folks who enjoy Bill Burroughs might give it a whirl. For what it's worth, the next book in the series, "A Signal Shattered", is even more disjointed. If you are expecting hard science fiction in the sense of Niven or Clarke, stay away. I don't buy the PKD comparison, either. I've been devouring every Phil Dick book I could find since 1969. Dick wrote some muddled-reality sequences to cover when his characters were going through a crisis period, but in this case the whole book is written in that style.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book: a page turner and thought provoker.
Review: This book is somewhere beyond cyberpunk...if "hyperpunk" (mentioned in one of the above reviews) is a genre, show me where I can find more! In terms of enjoyability and mental stimulation I put Nylund almost on the level of Stephenson and Gibson. Signal to Noise was good enough that I express ordered the sequel before I finished the first book. Excellent book
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