Reviews for Idlewild
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Multiple layers of virtual reality unfold like onion skins in this future-shocker. In a rather blatant example of genre-plot-staple cross-pollination, first-novelist and screenwriter Sagan (Carl Sagan fils) takes the killer-virus-decimating-humanity-plot, wraps it inside an is-this-real? VR environment and tosses in some moody dark fantasy scene-stealers with a hint of David Bowie's Space Oddity as the icing on top. Gabriel Hall, a teenager with a morbid imagination (thus his nickname: "Halloween"), attends an exclusive college in the future where he and his small band of classmates spend most of their time in a VR world. The environment they embody, with its field trips spent talking to Charles Darwin, and odd conflicts involving gibbering clones with machine guns and faceless Lovecraftian "nightnauts," is a fun but frightening place, something like Disneyworld seen through a Hieronymous Bosch filter. Gabe has anxieties at the start of the story, since he doesn't remember anything about why he's in the world—a short-circuit in the system temporarily wiped much of his memory—and he believes he might have killed his classmate Lazarus (they all have names like that: Fantasia, Mercutio, Champagne). Sagan occasionally dips out of Gabe's nightmarish quest for truth to check in with the scientists at Gedaechtnis, a research center connected to Gabe's school that's frantically trying to find the cure for Black Ep, a hundred-percent fatal disease that lurked for years in humanity's DNA and is now sweeping the globe like a scythe. The official reason for all the VR loopiness the students endure is that it's all education, but after a scene in which Gabe is (virtually) buried alive by Maestro, the VR instructor, it's pretty obvious that something else is going on behind the scenes. While it might seem a rather lumbering affair when laid out, Idlewild nips along quite nicely, deftly sidestepping the overly drawn-out or too-fraught-with-meaning scenarios one might expect from this apocalyptic masquerade. Sagan may have more imagination than he knows what to do with—a wonderful thing in a new author. Copyright ŠKirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
The tension is palpable from the first page as a young man recovering from a powerful electrical shock realizes that all he knows is that he's about 18 and a student of some kind--and that Lazarus is dead. Halloween, as he is known, becomes certain that someone wants him dead, too. He is one of 10 students attending an exclusive Immersive Virtual Reality boarding school while their bodies lie in a hospital attached to IVs and virtual-reality equipment. Add to the mix a hard-nosed virtual schoolmaster, virtual nannies, and sophisticated computer hacking as the teens try to manipulate the system. In his first novel, the son of Carl Sagan captures perfectly the voice and actions of a rebellious, extremely intelligent teenager. Juxtaposed with Halloween's first-person narrative are snippets of events in a lab where scientists are working against time to cure a deadly plague capable of wiping out all human life. Though its appeal is much wider, recommend this mesmerizing, multilayered futuristic tale to fans of Card's Ender novels. --Sally Estes Copyright 2003 Booklist
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Awakening with amnesia after a near-death experience, the 17-year-old narrator, alias Halloween, is propelled into a "virtual reality" educational landscape supervised by a mysterious teacher dubbed the Maestro and populated by eight other students playing dangerous games. Certain that someone is trying to murder him, Halloween begins to delve beneath the layers of illusion to discover that not only his life but also that of humanity is at stake. In this fast-paced debut set in the near-future, the son of the late astronomer Carl Sagan touches upon contemporary issues such as technology immersion, youth violence, and the fear of biological disaster. But filtered through the eyes of an angsty, self-absorbed, albeit smart, teenager, the narration becomes claustrophobic and thin, despite the ambitious scope of the plot. Aimed at the audiences of The Matrix and Minority Report and fans of Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, and Mark Danielewski, Sagan's novel lacks their richness and depth, occasionally reading more like a drawn-out short story rather than a novel. Still, disregarding publicity hype, it is a fine debut by a writer with potential to grow, and fans of those same authors will enjoy this as a quick beach read. Recommended.-Ann Kim, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Billed as a near-future thriller, Sagan's first novel plods through terrain all too familiar to SF readers. The narrator awakens with amnesia in a mysterious realm easily identified as a computer-generated virtual reality, fraught with metaphors and symbols. He slowly grasps that his name is Halloween, and that he may have murdered someone called Lazarus. Eventually, he realizes he's one of a handful of high school students attending "Immersive Virtual Reality" classes at the Idlewild IVR Academy, sponsored by the Gedaechtnis Corporation, a multinational biotech company. Intimidated by the villainous teacher, Maestro, and wary of his fellow students, Halloween is determined to recover his memory, apparently damaged in a power surge that threatened to destroy the IVR, and learn what really happened to the missing Lazarus. Despite a compelling twist near the middle, the low tension and meandering plot will likely frustrate the primary target audience, mainstream fans of such futuristic action films as The Matrix and Minority Report. Sagan may not be the next Philip K. Dick or William Gibson, but he shows enough talent here to suggest he can improve on pacing in the promised sequel. (Aug. 11) Forecast: As the son of the late popular astronomer Carl Sagan, the author is bound to get more than the usual media attention for a first novel. The stark, stylish jacket-of an impressionistic brown-toned butterfly superimposed on a "solar eclipse"-signals that, unlike a lot of genre SF, this is a class act. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
