Softworld (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9789370090934)

The game of life sucks, so why not change the rules?

Brent Berlin might have a lot of problems but being dead is the least of them. Well, maybe not dead, not really - he's only pretending to be dead because he has no other choice. He's a sentient program haunting online cemeteries, forced to masquerade as a dead man so he can fit in with the virtual epitaphs, the coils that inhabit the memorial parks in the virtual world of New Meta. Still, his life isn't all that bad, he's managed to make an honest living out of stealing sin then selling it to living visitors, but things change when he gets trapped with a psychotic diva who's obsessed with skinning her victims for fashion. Worse still, she has a taste for revenge and he's an amuse-bouche that she can't refuse.

Softworld is a humor-laced speed-run through an online universe populated by burned out punk rockers, copyright-obsessed silent film stars and old frenemies with an axes to grind. An admixture of golden age science fiction and modern cyberpunk, Softworld is part epic quest, part revenge fantasy and a sardonic journey through the most capitalist video game ever made. It speaks to the universal need to fit in, the fluidity of memory and changing the world one cheat code at a time. In the real world, some jobs might kill you, but in Softworld there's almost always an extra life.