Omnitopia Dawn
Diane Duane
360 pages
published in 2010
Omnitopia Dawn revolves around the upcoming launch of a new extension to the world’s most popular online RPG, Omnitopia, the deadline of which is just days away. Omnitopia is so popular because it’s not just one game, but it’s like something you’d get if you’d roll World and Warcraft, City of Heroes, Second Life and every other current online game into one gigantic universum, held together by the Ring, the one place where you can move from world to world directly. It’s the brainchild of Dev Logan, the CEO and principle inventor of Omnitopia and all around nice guy, who is more interested in creating wonderful new gaming experiences than the bottom line. Which is why he split up with his old buddy Phil Sorensen, who was more interested in making money than in endlessly fiddling with the game and who is now Logan’s most bitter rival and is doing his best to ruin him.
What this reminded me of were Arthur Hailey’s business novels, like Hotel, Airport and Wheels, all of which revolved around an iconic American business in crisis and its heroic executives trying to turn it around, as well as a cast of dozens of other characters going around their daily doings. Omnitopia Dawn has the exact same plot, only this being the twentyfirst century the business in crisis is the world largest and most popular online roleplaying game. It is barely science fiction, only set a couple of years in the future (2018 if I remember correctly), with the world still recognisably our own. A bit of technological improvement, but the most futuristic gadget on display is a bog standard virtual reality system. What instead gives it a sfnal flavour are the parts of the novel set in Omnitopia itself.
As per usual when a science fiction writer starts writing about virtual reality, online computer games and all that good stuff, it’s completely different from how those things actually work — and completely wrong, if you’re feeling uncharitable. For some reasons science fiction writers more than others are apt to take the metaphors of computing and cyberspace seriously as concrete realities. Take for example A Point of Honor in which the heroes actually go on a proper quest in their pseudo-medieval gamespace to track down the bad guys. In Omnitopia Dawn you see the same sort of thing, with Dev and his people fighting off a hacker invasion with hand to hand combat in virtual reality, shown in great detail by Duane. This is not how things really work, to put it mildly.
Even for futuretech this does not make sense. But it obeys the rule of Cool and is more exiting than reading scenes of guys typing really fast while watching status monitors. It just annoys me that twenty years after computers, cyberspace and the internet became mainstream we’re still saddled with the same sort of nonsense that writers used to imagine when 4 megabyte of hot ram was actually kind of impressive.
I’m a bit ashamed to have to confess that this was my first Diane Duane novel. As such it was a decent enough novel, but not something that would make me want to seek out more of the author’s work, had it not been for so many people I trust being huge Duane fans. Read this if you want something undemanding but marginally interesting.
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