Item - It Came from the Internet

With my computer science background, few things annoy me more than ludicrously stupid portrayals of computer technology in popular culture. For this reason, I braced myself to really hate this book. Rather to my surprise, it didn't bother me too much. Obviously, there's not a great degree of realism on display here, what with computer viruses that can pop out of the monitor and bite people, but enough sense of reality underlies the fantasy that I could suspend my disbelief and accept it without cringing. Also good is the fact that the book largely focuses on a single plotline. There are some stupid deaths and pointless asides, but after the last two books of disjointed random wandering, it was nice to see some degree of consistency again. Add a gratuitous maze to keep things interesting and you have an unexceptional but entirely readable adventure which explores some technological themes that are too new to have been explored during the height of gamebooks in the eighties.

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