Cyber Seed quadrilogy 1: Sycamore

The main character seems to find a remarkable amount of time in the first few chapters to make soup while he's supposed to be catching a bus, but once we get to the end of chapter 9, the story seems have settled down into The Circle, and the reader is left wondering whether it's then going to turn into 1984, The One, or The Warehouse.

By chapter 32 (of 63 in the first book of the series), the story is just a few variations away from being a cross between The Circle and The Matrix, with hints of both 1984 and Minority Report. At the start of chapter 37, the story even mentions "putting people into a matrix", and is heading very much towards Ready Player One.

Not very many chapters further on, it has now morphed into a sinister combination of The Circle, Ready Player One and Permanent Record.

I have to admit, that by chapter 54 (or sometime shortly before) the story really has become quite engaging, and there's a clear aspect of "what happens next? I need to keep on reading" to the book. It's certainly very well-written in that respect.

All in all, by the time you get to the end of the book, you feel that there really was a story there, and it's worth going on with. By this point it feels like an amalgam of The Circle and Vox, heavily influenced by Permanent Record and with mild (but unpleasant, not like the original) hints of Ready Player One.

Let's see how the next three parts go.

Sycamore is followed by Sycamore 2.

Coming back to the text itself, though, the author has an unfortunate penchant for apostrophes, as in:

• "You're job was having the idea, and a damn good one it was." (chapter 17)
• "An image appeared in the centre of his vista and was quickly duplicated, with only a few seconds passing until one of the avatar's grew by four inches." (chapter 25)
• "When someone gets a Seed that let's them become whoever they want, you better believe they're going to become it." (also chapter 25)

He makes up for it on occasion with omission, such as:

• "The we' caught in his throat but it had to be said." (chapter 43).

The grammar is occasionally questionable, too, as in:

• "There doesn't have to be sides, Jacobs." (chapter 51)

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