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Beautiful Red
Beautiful Red
Beautiful Red
Ebook229 pages5 hours

Beautiful Red

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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The future is boring. Technology has solved the world's most pressing problems, leaving people with tedious work and mundane play. Jack is a Security Officer Class 5, which sounds important, but isn't. However, her banal life as a cubicle worker by day and tinkerer by night is interrupted when she discovers that her employer's computer system has been invaded. 

Jack enlists the help of her only friends - her co-worker, Gilles and Adrian, an online friend she's never met - to help her track down the source of the invasion. Her investigation leads her to a shadowy group called the Red, where Jack learns that not everyone lives a life of quiet servitude. 

Even though she believes that the Red are responsible for a series of gruesome attacks, Jack begins to become attracted to their worldview. In her search for the people responsible for the attacks, she confronts the leaders of the group as well as her own burgeoning sense of self-awareness.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 20, 2007
ISBN9780973746723
Beautiful Red
Author

M Darusha Wehm

M. DARUSHA WEHM is the Nebula Award-nominated and Sir Julius Vogel Award-winning author of the interactive fiction game The Martian Job, as well as the science fiction novels Beautiful Red, Children of Arkadia, The Voyage of the White Cloud, and the Andersson Dexter cyberpunk detective series. Their mainstream books include the Devi Jones’ Locker YA series and the humorous coming-of-age novel The Home for Wayward Parrots. Darusha’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in many venues, including Terraform and Nature. Originally from Canada, Darusha lives in Wellington, New Zealand after spending several years sailing the Pacific.

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Reviews for Beautiful Red

Rating: 3.8333332866666665 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It is a fast and fun read. It is very character driven, which is unusual and refreshing for the genre. The protagonist is driven by boredom and some vague sense of maybe getting somewhere in the world, which is realistic and atypical for sci-fi. You can relate to her, if not her world.As a mystery, the story plays fast and loose with incredible coincidences and sloppy guess work. The central mystery is shallow. If the connections were drawn in a different order, with different explanations it might have been more believable and intriguing. As it is, Jake sees relationships between isolated events that seem to incredible. There are no real red herrings or detective work. As sci-fi, it is half and half. I appreciate hard sci-fi, where the writer creates a plausible technology, or no-sci-fi, where the writer just accepts the technology with no explanation and little fanfare, because it is just available in their world. Like fiction writers don't explain television, it just is.Wehm jumps between incredible fantasy technology that is implausible (how does Jake's custom 3D UI know how to simulate the contents of a strangers mind and extrapolate her face) with no explanation, but will spend paragraphs explaining magnetic levitation.As an ending though, that was wonderful. It brought things to a very human level and I found it satisfying and a little unnerving.As a novel it was very enjoyable and the flaws were only mildly distracting. I would love to read more about Jake and her world.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A good book with likeable characters and a decent story plot. I felt it was sort of a mixture of the movies Strange Days, Total Recall, and Minority Report. The ending was not what I had expected it to be.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    If you like your sci-fi full of cyber-tech, intrigue, moral questions and just that slight touch of nihilism, then you should read Beautiful Red by M. Darusha Wehm. It is a well-written, well-crafted and engaging novel.It is the story of Jack, who works as a security officer in a world where corporations run the show and most human interaction takes place in a virtual environment. One day she stumbles on some anomalous security breaches which lead her into the path of a radical protest group that may be engaging in sinister and criminal activities.The author, M. Darusha Wehm, knows how to write credible characters and how to create a realistic, potential society. She shapes a complete civilization where you feel the characters could exist comfortably. As a reader I felt her postulated world could easily come in to existence as a possible future.I enjoyed Ms. Wehm’s point of view and her plot was both interesting and provocative. Many of the themes woven into the novel’s structure tackle compelling societal questions. I highly recommend this book.

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Beautiful Red - M Darusha Wehm

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