Peter Watts Praises “MultiReal”

December 6, 2007 @ 1:22 pm

I had been planning to unveil this news at a later time closer to the book’s July release date. But I just browsed to the Amazon page for MultiReal and saw that the news is already out. So no use waiting.

Peter Watts, Hugo Award-nominated author of Blindsight and the Rifters Trilogy (Starfish, Maelstrom, and Behemoth), expert in the ecophysiology of marine mammals, Canadian, and just all-around nice guy, has given an advance blurb for my upcoming novel MultiReal. Here’s what Peter has to say:

A thoroughly-successful hybrid of Neuromancer and Wall Street, MultiReal is the kind of thought-experiment we need more of around here: rigorously backgrounded, tightly plotted, and built around one of the most intriguing neurotech conceits I’ve encountered in years. William Gibson once observed that the street finds its own uses for things. David Louis Edelman reminds us that both boardroom and back room do as well — and the people who lurk in those places are a lot scarier…

I invite all of you to visit Peter’s website and Peter’s blog (which currently bears the title “No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Reloaded)”), and throw the man some love. Go buy Blindsight. Go build monuments in the man’s honor.

I’m very, very pleased with this blurb. I especially like the ellipses at the end. And being compared to William Gibson (twice!) is a high honor, considering that the man is one of my favorite authors, period, in any genre.

If I can convince people like Peter Watts, Ian McDonald, and Norman Spinrad — people who are much, much smarter than me — that I know what I’m talking about, I must be doing something right. Spinrad even said in Asimov’s that I have “convincing and convincingly detailed knowledge of the physiology and biochemistry of the human nervous system down to the molecular level,” a quote I never, ever get tired of repeating because of its sheer, unmitigated untruthfulness.

Remember, folks: MultiReal hits the stores in July of 2008. That’s plenty of time for you to buy copies of Infoquake for all your friends this holiday season and get them hooked on the trilogy too.

Thanks, Peter.