ThiGMOO

Eugene Byrne

ThiGMOO is esentially the story of a group of intelligent programs that evolve due to circumstances and end up taking over the world in a fairly non violent manner.

This novel has a very nifty feature that actually makes it an interactive novel, at the begining of major sections it has sugestions on how to set the correct atmosphere or to better empathise with a major character, there will be sugetions highlighted with NOTE TO READER:. These sugestions will be things such as "Pour a large glass of your favourite single malt to sip as you read this chapter" or "To get a better picture of how this character feels at this point in time stay up until three in the moring doing something that requires a large amount of concentration then hold a conversation with a very stupid person" These are not actually direct quotes but the instructions were along those lines.

The notes to the reader are somewhat like those movie nights they have at some independant cinemas were there will be a cult movie like Blues Brothers or Rocky Horror playing and you go in costume.

The Intelligent Programs / Artificial Intelligences that I mentioned earlier are called Erams, they started life in a hardcore computer system called the Museum of the Mind, housed in the history department of a university in England. The Erams are fictional characters based on historical characters used as a teaching tool to enable people to learn what things were like in the past.

The Eram characters came from all walks of life from many diferent time periods, some were put together by history professors others by people with an intrest in a particular historical time period.

The Museum was very popular and profitable for the university until a rogue mormon Eram tried to start converting other Erams to his faith which sparked the invention of a new Eram religion and the programs started trying to lynch each other. The programs became more intelligent and began evolving. Some erams went rogue and started doing damage to computer systems around the world.

The Rogue erams lead to the Museum being shut down, before it was fully decomissioned a number of the Erams managed to copy their programs and "escape" into the computer networks of the world. The Erams required a huge amount of resources to survive so they went in search of a new place to "live", the majority of the novel is concerned with this search.

The story is narated by one of the Erams telling the full story to one of the creators of the Museum of the Mind, with other erams telling their parts of the story and some of the Human characters filling in the gaps, this does tend to make it somewhat disjointed, but the reader quickly adapts.

The cover relates to the Erams taking over the Television networks, it is a clever idea, it is just a pitty it is so fuzzy.

All in all it is a bit like the skynet scenario that was put accross in the third terminator film but a more utopian version of the same concept, where the machines actally improve the word by taking it over. It would be very entertaining to follow the interactive instructions while reading it, perhaps if a list of required items were provided it would be easier as then youcould have them at hand as they became relevant.