About the Book
ONE
DOUBTING THOMAS JEFFERSYNTH
Cybernesia
The annual Pilot's Festival was well underway at Don Sturm's and Karuna Drang's place, though their place was a DIVE-- a deep-immersion virtual environment--and their DIVE wasn't a place at all. Sturm and Drang weren't their legal names, either, and they hadn't physically cohabited for months.
Not that it mattered much. At the moment Karuna Drang was discarnately embodying herself as spritely Sally Hemmings, slave and mistress. Though her portrayal was relatively accurate, Don Sturm's morbidly thoughtful and conflicted Thomas Jefferson was quite different from the historical founding father, and his halo of neon blue hair wasn't exactly period. But blue hair was one of Don's personal signatures in meatlife, and he hadn't been able to resist.
All around them, virtual party people--likewise electronically embodied in eighteenth-century drag--danced and cavorted about the grounds of a mimetic Monticello. Alternating between the forms of an aggressively ambiguous nymph and its counterpart satyr-o- maniac, Medea ?rate chased bewigged men in breeches, then pursued women who proved surprisingly light-footed, given their voluminous dresses and titanic coiffures.
Normally Don's default virtualscape was Easter Island, so his Jeffersonian estate boasted moai, the great-headed statues, as lawn and garden sculptures around which the laughing would-be orgiasts darted, disappearing from view--only to reappear as a tangled ball of licking, sucking, nibbling, stroking, rutting sexual gymnasts, Medea lodged in their midst.
Don/Thomas shook his head.
I know that's how they pull off their grand data exchanges, he said to Karuna/Sally. And I'm sure what they're doing in virtual space is only a metaphor, but I still wish they'd make use of a more subtle metaphor.
Karuna/Sally laughed
'To hack is to explore and manipulate', she said, imitating Medea's lyrical-as-Pan, shrill-as-Bacchante manner of speaking. 'To enter and be entered. Like foreplay and sex, like parasite and host, n'est-ce pas?'
Don frowned. Music sounded around them. The Jed Astaires, a retro-urbane bluegrass group, played danceable new arrangements of works by Revolutionary War-era tunesmith William Billings. In the sky above them, sunset's salmon-colored clouds flickered and transformed into shoals of swimming salmon, then morphed back to clouds again.
You look preoccupied, Karuna/Sally said. Even e-bodied, I can tell. What's on your mind?
Just looking over what we've wrought, Don/Tom said, gazing out at their Colonial Williamsburg-meets-Polynesia surroundings. On their personal channel, he turned down the volume of the Astaires' musical variations. Not to say that it's overwrought, mind you. Just that the nature of this event is somewhat paradoxical.
How so?
Well, it feels as if I've usurped a public event just to celebrate a personal success, and either way the celebrants don't know what they're celebrating.
Don, you have every right to celebrate! Prime Privacy Protocol is a winner. It's on its way to becoming the most popular encryption software in the infosphere.
Even if no one associates my name with it. . . .
Yes, but you, 'Mister Obololos, ' you're the one who made it happen.
Maybe that anonymity's a good thing. The law enforcement types are getting really shrill in condemning it. Today there was an op-ed piece in the New York Times that accused P-Cubed of
Review :
"Hendrix's sentences have punch, his plots have points, and he knows his science--what more can one ask of cutting edge science fiction?"
--Gregory Benford, physicist and Nebula Award-winning author of Timescape
"One of the very best novelists writing in science fiction today."
--Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of "The Years of Rice and Salt
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"Stephen Hawking meets Tom Clancy! Quantum physics and international intrigue combine in the best novel yet by the finest new SF writer of the last decade. Howard V. Hendrix's THE LABYRINTH KEY is the book everyone will be talking about this year, not just in science-fiction circles, but also in the halls of power in Washington."
--Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of "Hominids"
"With the hip fecundity of Neal Stephenson, the speculative acuity of John Brunner, and the suspense-building audacity of John LeCarre, Howard Hendrix fashions a science-fiction thriller that's truly twenty-first-century in its tone, subject matter and style. Blending metaphysics with quantum physics, THE LABYRINTH KEY explores a possible future fusion of magic and science that is truly revolutionary. Hopping from exotic real-world locales to even more outre virtualities, this tale will keep the reader guessing till its climax."
--Paul DiFilippo, author of "Fuzzy Dice" and "A Mouthful of Tongues
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"If Robert Ludlum or Eric Ambler had written a science fiction novel, then it might have resembled THE LABYRINTH KEY. An intriguing thriller, it's also first-rate speculation: a masterful blend of genres. If you searching for thought-provoking novel, this shouldn't be missed."
--Alan Steele, HugoAward-winning author of "Chronospace"
"ONE OF THE VERY BEST NOVELISTS WRITING IN SCIENCE FICTION TODAY."
--KIM STANLEY ROBINSON, award-winning author of the Mars Trilogy
"One could almost imagine that some of the action sequences of this novel were written by Tom Clancy, while some of the scientific discussions remind one of Gregory Benford, and two sequences involving hiking in the Sierra Nevadas could have been written by Kim Stanley Robinson. The past few years have spawned several other novels of cryptology and secret histories, most notably Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon," but Hendrix has been perhaps the most successful incorporating such concepts into a hard-SF context."-"Off the Shelf," SciFi.com "From the Trade Paperback edition."
