Psychodrome

Hawke, Simon. Psychodrome. New York: Ace, 1987.

A variety of cyberpunk (for its precedessors and relatives, see under Literary Criticism, L. McCaffery, guest ed., MR47/48).[[1]] Psychodrome is a game played over an interstellar area by players with implanted biochips, allowing the home audience to follow their adventures plugged into their "psych-fidelity," or "psy-fi," sets (5); one of the major players is bioengineered and had built for himself a deadly prosthetic arm. The narrator-protagonist is a small-time gambler with a great-grandfather who'd been "an unregenerate technophobe"—of whom the protagonist comes to think better (194) when his Psychodrome experience shows him that his great-grandfather's more paranoid and cynical visions of the misuse of technology by Authority were somewhat optimistic. Caution: This book needs an additional draft, among other things clarifying how we should view the positively presented "SS commandos" (see esp. 84-85, 91-92).