Book shorts

It's called by philosophers (and by at least two characters in the book) "performative utterance"—saying a thing makes it so. In RL (real life) this applies to words such as the "I do" in the marriage ceremony, but in the world of online chat all speech is performative. The world is literally created by words, be those text chats or the more arcane language of code.

Kit Reed, a respected speculative fiction writer, knows this terrain well enough to craft not only a lively story about the people who hang out in virtual-world chats (and the people they are when they log out), but about online privacy, the importance of code, and even a bit of dot-com-career lust. @Expectations is a nifty story—sort of a fictionalized, melodramatized version of Julian Dibbell's My Tiny Life, and that was certainly a fine way to spend a lazy afternoon—and deserves a better readership than it's likely to attract with the cheesy women's-book cover it was sporting when it reached my geekish hands.

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More About

• Rebbecca Ray
• Kit Reed
• Tom Gilling
• Parenting
• Books and Literature

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The fun is marred by a big honking canard of a plot device designed to make us understand that see, some folks online really ARE crazy. Reed didn't have to do it; chat and Usenet regulars know full well that some folks online are bonkers enough plain without making them fancy. Extraordinary plot devices are of course the prerogative of the speculative-fiction writer, but this one rings so hollow that it knocks the reader right out of the suspended hammock of disbelief—and since the book (not to mention the entire online chat experience) is about suspending disbelief, that's a problem.

The reader is advised to pick herself up, dust herself off, and return to the hammock. @Expectations has, eventually, a real charm—Jenny may not be an ideal heroine, but the point is that real ones never are, and Reed has a terrific feel for the strange and shifting reality boundaries of VR and RL for those deep in the chat lifestyle. @Expectations turns out better than anyone accustomed to run-of-the-mill "cyber" fiction has a right to, um, expect.

Angela Gunn