Thoroughly addicted Great read! This is the 3rd+ in a series that I’ve been enjoying immensely. I think this is the best book yet purely based on the storytelling and the entertaining and real personalities participating in the author’s unfolding story. The story as told is a perfect melding of broad revolutionary ideas with a collection of flawed limited and self-oriented mere individuals. The series began as an exploration of virtual reality and how the barriers between the virtual and real world might blur and what the human impact could be and has slowly and perhaps inevitably come to include the idea of artificial intelligence and cybernetic life. Great twists, lots of suspense, not easy to put down.

An imaginative page-turner Perion Synthetics is about robots, well really, a possible future world sprinkled with synthetic humans. It is also a story about secrets of a great corporation and the intergenerational change of leadership in a tightly held company. Just as it is a reality in 2014 to take Google autonomous cars without a human touching the controls as it drives from city to city, some of the robots in this book are entirely plausible, and could be logical extensions of stories we read about in today’s news. But then you turn a page and you have crossed into the implausible – these are state of the art augmentations and future synthetic human models. Buck Rogers space travel was equally unbelievable in 1928. Who is to say whether Verastiqui’s story is not the future path taken by research in artificial intelligence and material science when we look backward a hundred years from now? Each of six main characters is introduced in depth. As you read along, a complex multi-dimensional story emerges as you see the plot from each of the different perspectives. I accepted the story from Cameron’s point of view, until I read Cynthia’s and so on. It was like looking through a hexagon windowed display in a museum. The new angles allowed the reader to comprehensively see the complete story. Knowing there is no sequel yet and coming to the end of the story, ordinarily the reader might feel let-down, a bit like post partum blues, but not here. The author has kindly provided the antidote and frosting on the cake, by dishing up a coda for each character so you know what happens to them after the story concludes.