Omnitopia Dawn

'''Duane, Diane. ‘’Omnitopia Dawn’’.''' New York: DAW 2010. Reviewed by Ed Carmien. ‘’SFRA Review’’ #294 (Fall 2010): 11-12, our source here.

Classified by Carmien as “mundane SF” (what Thomas P. Dunn called “near-in SF”) — set in 2015 — and which Carmien finds “a fun read,” perhaps especially for Young Adults, without much for “those who indulge in scholarly SF work,” in the sense of the book’s having some “Deep Message about Humanity.” Relevant and useful here, however, for consideration of MMORPG’s in fiction — “massively multiplayer online role-playing game[s” — and in this case one with “utopian gaming,” with “games that teach, gamers who form a really nice collective culture, an online society zealously guarded from predators and cheaters by noble do-gooders who wander the system,” but with virtual-world “True Death,” with cases of death of an avatar without resurrection, although, apparently, without harm to the human gamer. Rather implausibly for 2015, Carmien thought in 2010 (and clearly true as this entry is written), Omnitopia provides a virtual deep-immersion space in “which gamers in all manner of online games can come together and visit each other’s virtual worlds. Dungeon crawlers from ‘’World of Warcraft’’-type worlds mingle with fans of a ‘microcosm’ — a miniature, user-developed game world — devoted to the artistic production of a million monkeys, intelligent bears that smell of [Philip] Pullman go adventuring with avatars dressed in winter camo.”

Duane has done fantasy, and we should note the presence in Omnitopia — and its competitor, Infinite Worlds? — of juxtaposed realistic and fantastic elements, plus the eutopian, with the story itself having a primary world close to ours and “mundane.”

Carmien draws parallels between themes in ‘’Omnitopia Dawn’’ and “future gaming a la [Charles] Stross’s ‘’Halting State’’, immersive gaming as per ‘’Dream Park’’, avatar combat to protect computer systems” like that in ‘’Snow Crash’’, “dueling technocrats, such as in IRON MAN 2, and the coming to consciousness of a “friendly AI” like Mike/Michelle in Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘’The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’’. Note also high-tech “office systems that handle reports” such as in P. K. Dick’s ‘’The Minority Report’’.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 22Dec18