Rating: 
Summary: It's great!
Review: Mr Nylund has added to the Cyberpunk genre in an amazing way. The book grabs you from the first page and won't let you put it down. It leaves you screaming for more. I read it twice before "coming up for air". I highly recommend it!
Rating: 
Summary: Entirely Noise
Review: In a slew of absurd, uni-dimensional characters, Nylund's ill defined, post-cataclysmic world exists in a void with no reasonable connection to our own. A singular theme ties together a haphazard array of unoriginal ideas all of which lead to a baffling and extraordinarily mundane ending.I regret purchasing this book.
Rating: 
Summary: The best thing he's written since Pawn's Dream!
Review: Okay, I'll be honest. I really enjoyed Eric's first book "Pawn's Dream", but his others have left me feeling empty. Not so with "Signal to Noise". The story evolves far beyond the synopsis on the dustjacket, and takes the reader on a ride that keeps you guessing up until the last pages. The character development, and logical progression of events reminded me favorably of George R.R. Martins "A Game of Thrones". I highly recommend this book to fiction lovers everywhere.
Rating: 
Summary: an interesting topic, and train of logic, but unpolished
Review: I liked many aspects of the book, but overall, found it to be generally light reading, touching only briefly on deeper social issues.
Rating:
Summary: The best Science Fiction book I have ever read!
Review: The author has used all of his extensive knowledge and finely tuned imagination to create a realistic and frightening senerio of the near future complete with the realistic paranoia the we all need to face if the SETI search should just happen to succeed.
Rating: 
Summary: Promising but frustrating SF thriller. 2.5 stars
Review: _____________________________________________
Jack watched his office walls sputter malfunctioning mathematical
symbols and release a flock of passenger pigeons; his nose was tickled
with the odor of eucalyptus. Inside, the air rippled with synthetic
pleasure and the taste of vanilla.
" I need to get in there," he told the government agent who blocked
the doorway.
"No admittance," the agent said, "until we've completed our
investigation."
So opens this "hyperpunk" novel, a fascinating, maddening &
ultimately frustrating novel by new-to-SF writer Eric Nylund.
He starts with some nice PK Dick "what is reality?" touches and
a bit of hardboiled noir:
"I'm not in the spy business," Jack slurred.
Reno's brown eye pinned him with a stare. "You are now."
The background is generic cyberpunk - mean streets, Big Bad Corps, a
wrecked environment -- OK, I can live with that, but here comes
What Went Wrong -- after a big earthquake, "Baja California vanished,
Mexico turned into a chain of volcanic islands, the West Coast
submerged..." Oh boy. This is about as likely to happen as... [insert
dumb popular belief here -- alligators in the NYC sewers, hair
sprouting on your palms...] Continents *float* in denser rock, like a
cork in water, as an hour spent with a geology text, or 10 minutes with
a geologist would have told Mr Nylund. Oy.
Weel, whathehell, it's jarring, but how many geologists are gonna
read the thing anyway? The writing's good, the VR extrapolations are
cool, the pages turn... but the characters jump too obviously to auctorial
diktat: tenured faculty leap to follow Jack from academic comfort to
startup squalor. Jack and his colleague Isabel are falling in love --
suddenly she's a cold-hearted, power-hungry executive bitch... Oy, oy.
Nylund's read a lot of science fiction, and it keeps coming back, in big
undigested lumps: here's a chunk of Varley ... there's some Bear -
wait, now it's ersatz Spinrad.... Humph. There aren't many real
innovators in SF, but you *are* supposed to file off the serial
numbers. Plus he has the Six Impossible Things before breakfast
problem... Oy, oy, oy.
Writing book reviews has made me a more careful and critical
reader -- not an unmixed blessing for recreational reading. In
years past, I would have finished the book, felt vaguely dissatisfied,
and gone on to the next. Now, I finish the book, spend half the
morning writing this review, and know *exactly* why I'm
dissatisfied. Doubly annoying, in this case, because it started out well
and could have been excellent.
This is Nylund's fourth novel, but it reads like a first . The scientific bloopers should have been fixed -- he
has a good background in physics and chemistry. The problems with
writing craft -- I dunno. I hope he grows out of them, but in a fourth
novel?
Not recommended.
Rating:
Summary: great story for a great genre
Review: Amazon relentlessly recommeded this book through its A.I. Shaky recommendation. Characters- couldn't care less. Terrible character development. Plot was ALL over the place, and not in a good way. Some interesting ideas, never fully developed.
Rating:
Summary: Hyperpunk? Hmm.
Review: Amazon referred this book to me as one that William Gibson fans liked. If that's how you found it, keep looking-- although I don't doubt that anybody who likes this book probably likes William Gibson. The plot moved along, sure. There was some of the grittiness that you expect from Gibson or Shirley, and Nylund tried hard, without quite succeeding, to make it ring true. What was most annoying about the book, though, more than the fake street-smarts, was how friggin STUPID the protagonist was. No way a street kid-turned-spook would give an unknown alien what Jack was passing out. By the end, I was mostly reading the book in the hope that Jack would get what he had coming, but no such luck. Hang in there. Maybe Gibson only writes a book every three or four years, but they're worth the wait.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book, Made me Feel like I was in a Bubble
Review: Nylund throws down a great premise and then blasts you with all of these concepts of bubbles, VR, and even some hard science. The science was rather well researched and I almost wished he could have gone more into it but that's cause I am a nerd. The way in which he almost makes it difficult to decipher reality versus virtual reality portrays perfectly what the characters themselves have to go through. Well designed because the technology in it (aliens excluded) is totally possible and that makes it all the more meaningful. Well done.
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