But what I was expecting was not what I got. I wasn't expecting the genre because I wasn't paying attention. I don't want anyone else to make that same mistake.Gabriel and his friends discovered the Undernet, a secret architecture to the Internet. They charted their exploration on a message board called W0RLDTR33.Then they lost control. Someone broke into W0RLDTR33-someone who welcomed the violent hold the Undernet had on them. At great personal cost, Gabriel and the others thought they sealed the Undernet away for good. They were wrong. And now they will know the meaning of PH34R.
I originally thought that it was going to be something akin to the Cyberpunk 2077 notion of a gateway through the Blackwall or something, and that the mysterious "PH34R" was going to turn out to be an AI or something. But turns out that this is much more of a techno horror story (my first major clue should have been the author, who wrote Something Is Killing The Children amongst other horror books) than the purely cyberpunk jaunt that I was expecting. It's kind of a cross between one of the Global Frequency stories ("Invasive") and the movie Event Horizon (the one where the spaceship goes to an alternate "chaos dimension" and the ship brings back the evil with it), with not a little bit of some of the more esoteric aspects of Snow Crash relating to the nam-shub and memetic/linguistic programming.
Which all sounds pretty interesting (and is interesting), especially when couched in terms of the Undernetizens being an analog for surveillance as their goal is to have everyone connected via a hive mind a la the Borg, and yet I find it hard to recommend because it is just so dang graphic. There's a whole lot of nudity in it (the main antagonist walks around stark raving naked 98% of the time), and there's a lot of depictions of murder, blood, and gore. The premise is that a person finding an Undernet entry node and seeing the image(s) it presents essentially turns them into a homicidal maniac with scores of body count. It's kinda like if 4chan was meth - one hit and you're addicted.
That being said, the story spans 3 different time periods, has a nifty bit of retro tech in it as a result, ends up basically saying that a centralized, monetized Internet was the cause of the downfall of humanity that opened the door to invasion by whatever, and has some very interesting themes of mind control, memetic influence and control, and also offers some commentary on various para-social phenomenon brought on by the Internet as we know it today. There's some really smart commentary in here, if one can get past the gore (and also live with not having a satisfactory explanation on how there could be a network under the network that somehow linked to another dimension or whatever).
That's why I have a hard time recommending it. It's really good, but it's also very adult. And some of it seems a little gratuitous to me, although at the same time it does build up the tension and magnitude of the differences between the world we have and one bent to the vision of the Undernet. So I'll say that it's really good and I personally like the story quite a bit, but I would totally understand if anyone else was like, "nah, that's not my bag." I just wanted to call out the graphic nature of a lot of the content so anyone else new to the story wouldn't get a somewhat uncomfortable surprise like I did.
Consider yourself warned, but also welcome to W0RLDTR33. The Undernet may not be aliens, digital life from another dimension, or rogue AI from beyond the Blackwall (yet), but you can be damn sure that there's a surveillance state and surveillance capitalism that wants to control everyone on the planet just as bad as the fictional Undernetizens do.
