Subject: REVIEW: "Night Visions", Ronald Munson

From: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan and Trevor" <[email-masked]>
Date: 11 Oct 1999 23:13:37 -0400

Night Visions by Ronald Munson
	Review Copyright 1999 Rob Slade

Writers of fiction don't tend to be highly computer literate so I have, in
my time, read an awful lot of really bad stories using technology for plot
devices.  I don't think, however, that even completely formularized series
books such as "Eye of the Storm" live down to the level of this one in
terms of both abdication of any literary merit, and complete disregard of
the realities of technical possibility.

The characters strain credibility.  There is the gorgeous and athletic
heroine who wanted to be a biologist, reads scientific biographies for
recreation, but became an actress to please her mother.  The biology
lessons mustn't have gone very far since it takes her a while to figure
out that she is in the animal research lab that she was told about a few
chapters ago.  Our courageous psychiatrist is a former surgeon who
sharpened his anatomical skills by playing jackstraws with autopsy knives
(it's *amazing* how closely akin they are to throwing knives) and full
body anatomical charts.  Our evil super-genius hacker is also an
electronic stalker and, just so that you know how vile he is, both a
consumer and producer of necro-porn.  This "mastermind" tends to do little
advance planning, and also seems to be about as stupid as two bags of
rocks.  Inconsistencies in the behaviour of the villains are not a
problem, since they are all, clinically speaking, bonkers.  Just to level
the intellectual playing field, here, once our heroes have narrowed the
number of baddies to one, and all the hostages are either safe or dead, do
they walk out and leave the cleanup to the police?  Nooooo!

Would you build a facility for treating VIPs with depression or panic
disorders and have no windows in the building?  No, I didn't think so.

A policeman, on the basis of a rather tentative personal acquaintance,
outfits a somewhat disabled civilian with weaponry of slightly
questionable legality, and sends him off to do battle with the black hats.
Alone.  In the midst of a sizeable and quite public police operation.

You expect me to believe that this building has VIP suites in one part,
animal research in another, and only one door?  So they truck the bags of
Purina Rat Chow in (and the, umm, end products out) through the main
foyer?  Actually, while the labryinthian insides of the building are truly
mind boggling, this business of the structure having only one door,
crucial to the early part of the book, turns out to be very much not the
case after all.

A laser, especially a lab standard argon laser, is not a good weapon.
Although you could probably give someone a nasty lump if you hit them with
it.

Standard cable run channelling is far too small for anyone, even an
anorexic model or actress, to fit through.  If you are moving feet first
through a passage just barely big enough for your body to fit into, it
isn't likely that too many cobwebs are going to be left after you pass by.
Someone squirming their way through a duct of galvanized sheet metal is
going to make one heck of a racket.

Well, enough with the fairly easy problems with the book.  Let's get on
with the technical mistakes.

The modems used in the book are all the old acoustic coupler type.  It's
been a very long time since I used them, but I can never recall anyone
having to use talcum powder to get the cups to fit over handsets.  One
scene suggests that there is a difficulty with the acoustic coupler and a
non-500 (the old standard rotary dial desk set) handset.  This is partly
why the later acoustic couplers used flatter pickups, and why portable
computers now tend to use cellular modems.  Aside from the fact that
acoustic couplers generally didn't go beyond the Bell 103 standard 300
bits per second.  In this particular scene it is also hard to figure out
where the phone comes from: eventually I decided that it must have been a
car phone in the rental van.

The "hacking" scenes have just enough techie jargon to ensure that they
make no sense at all.

I can't recall precisely when the last BITNET nodes switched over, but I
think it was before this book was written.  In any case, BITNET was
definitely not the same as Usenet.  Also, a bang path was hardly a way to
disguise the originating node.  But that's OK, since turning off all the
phones and truly spoofing the email address would leave the authorities
with no way to reply to the gang.

The "social engineering" described in the book is pathetic, and the
"shoulder surfing" problematic.

COMMTALK, as far as I can recall, is a text based terminal emulation
program.  I must have missed the transformation that got it Internet
telephony and video capability.  I must admit that I was amazed at how
well outfitted the police were, being able to transmit an Internet video
signal from a regular crime scene.

Everyone who connects to the Internet, regardless of computer, provider,
or software, sees a countdown on their screen?  I'll have to look up the
RFC for UDMP (Universal Doomsday Message Protocol).

The police would be able to shut down power to the building, regardless of
the internal control.  A research lab, or a medical facility, might have
an internal backup power supply, but it would be limited.

Filename extensions are used for customer identification rather than data
types.

CAD (Computer Aided Design, or probably Drafting, in this case) is done on
a mainframe.  While wasteful, in this day of high end workstations, this
is barely possible.  What probably isn't possible is accessing those files
in a useful form without a specialized terminal.  Also, CAD is used to
find out precise details of the building, but in order to find another
exit you just go for a stroll around the place.  The idea of using CAD
files for a virtual reality walkthrough is good, as is the idea of using
gaming to impress facts into the mind, but the type of gaming actually
used in the book is pretty much guaranteed to distract the user from
learning architectural niceties.

A computer controlling building security is readily accessible from an
outside line.

The programmed threat in the book is one that will take down the telephone
network.  There is a correct assessment of some network related problems,
but saying that every net connected computer will crash is going a bit too
far.

A dewar flask full of liquid nitrogen produces enough mist, from boiling
nitrogen and condensing water vapour, that you cannot see the liquid
itself.  It does not produce enough mist to fog a room.  I wouldn't
recommend swimming in it, but you can plunge portions of your body in
liquid nitrogen for brief periods with no ill effects -- I've done it.
The specific heat of nitrogen is low enough that an enormous amount will
boil away without seriously chilling tissue at body temperature.  On the
other hand, if you do freeze tissue solid, the nitrogen does not combine
with oxygen in the tissues, and certainly doesn't explode.

This is the kind of book that gives reviewers a reputation for never
liking anything.

%A   Ronald Munson
%C   10 Alcorn Ave, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario, M4V 3B2
%D   1995
%G   0-451-18013-5
%I   Penguin/Signet/Roc
%O   U$5.99/C$6.99 416-925-2249 Fax: 416-925-0068 [email-masked]
%P   412 p.
%T   Night Visions

======================  (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
[email-masked]  [email-masked]  [email-masked] [email-masked]
There are two kinds of people: those who finish what they start
       and so on ...                              - Robert Byrne
http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev    or    http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade