Cover image for

The Escapist

Author James Morris
Categories Science Fiction, Creative Commons, Post-1930
Language English
Published 2005
Notes

(c) James Morris.

Approx. 55,729 words.

Excerpt

dvantage with Carmichael around. It was unusual for me to come across somebody so unreadable. She was legendary, but then so was I, albeit always as an untraceable alias.

Despite my many trips around the Solar System, it still filled me with joy to leave Earth. I loved the planetary views in transit, and I adored the notion that mankind was no longer tied to an arbitrary hunk of minerals, and was instead in a position to choose between a selection of hunks of minerals to live on. But most of all, my excitement arose simply from travelling itself. I got a childish kick out of being in any kind of vehicle, particularly one going somewhere fast. Moving from A to B felt like what life itself was all about. Getting there was always an anticlimax.

The Moon looked eerie in the darkness as we crossed from the shuttle pad. A guy called Chucky, one of COSI's minor moon operatives, picked me up from the pad in a small but comfortably pressurised balloon-wheeled vehicle. He was outrageously fat, but he lived on

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Average Rating:

2007.09.07
Lito

I’ve reading books from here for a while and this one has really pleased me. The characters are funny but believable, the plot is intriguing and full of action, and the set is above all incredibly well construct.
If you like computers and thinking about a possible future where everything is connected and life become half virtual, then here you a have good dose of it. Without forgetting deeper reflections on a.i. and machine’s self consciousness. Is eternal life a gift or a punishment?.

2006.07.08
Goldfish Stew

Entertaining Satire

The Escapist is an enjoyable tale set in a future world where technology reigns supreme and the hacker is the ultimate criminal. It's a world where all the stupid ideas from today have found their consummation, and many of the good ideas seem to have slipped away.

The story itself evolves into an elaborate mess of seemingly disconnected agenda that the author skillfully draws together in the close.

If there is a criticism of this story worth making, it is probably restricted to a single scene in which the lead character is "humourously" sexually assaulted with a vegetable. The scene added nothing to the plot and I'm not sure making light of sexual assault is the wisest of approaches.