re:mote voices

Title:Walkabout
Author: Eric Brown
Publisher:Dolphin

I had not really been more than peripherally aware of the Web series of children’s SF books from Orion’s Dolphin imprint until I came across Walkabout by UK SF writer Eric Brown in a bargain bin. Picking it up I find a series of grouped novellas, kid’s cyber punk fiction all taking place in 2027 connected to a worldwide virtual reality network known as The Web. Many of the contributions actually coming from credible and established British SF writers, like Ken MacLeod, Peter Hamilton, Stephen Baxter and of course Eric Brown.

Suzie is the first aboriginal Australian to be included in the national, mixed under 16’s football team. However she isn’t doing as well at school, so she has gone into the Web to find out about India for an assignment. There she meets Ana, an Indian girl from the untouchable caste, who she befriends. While playing an adventure game, things start to go wrong – manifestations of humanoid lizards are deliberately looking for Suzie, a crackdown by the Web police and the crashes that result.

Walkabout at least starts in a way that one is particularly aware that it is being pitched at a younger audience. Though as I got on with the reading, it was something I became less aware of. Thematically Eric Brown is a good choice for this series, Walkabout coming into the same kind of ballpark as the material at the core of his own New York Trilogy (NY Nights, NY Blues, NY Dreams). The other most obviously parallel material I can think of would be the work of Alexander Besher, particularly his first novel Rim, which followed the break down of a world wide virtual game system.

It is interesting to think of this kind of material being aimed at a young audience, though I suspect when I was the age that these books are aimed at I was already reading the real thing. The line up of writers is interesting, and I would be tempted to try and track down a few others in this sequence. Though I suspect with the publication date of 1999 I may well have already missed the boat, and the format of approximately 100 pages for an original cover price of £3.50 doesn’t seem an especially good balance.