Deep State (#2)
Game designer Dagmar Shaw is skilled at creating vast online entertainments with millions of players. But Dagmar is haunted by her past, and by memories of a burning city, and of the friends who died as a bloody vengeance plot played to its conclusion around her.
Dagmar is an expert at manipulating the online players known as the Group Mind. But when an acquaintance appears with the plan to manipulate an entire Middle Eastern country, to stage a revolution and make the people think it was all their own idea, Dagmar is both appalled and intrigued.
Can she crash the Deep State? And can she do it without creating another bloodbath?
This is no longer a game. The bullets, the tanks, and the spies are real, and so is the danger as Dagmar plunges into the task of gaming an entire state.
When it first appeared, Deep State gained a modest amount of infamy as the novel that predicted the Arab Spring, and appeared the very week the Egyptians occupied Tahrir Square.
Reviews
“DEEP STATE is a smart, absorbing trip through some maybe-not-so-imaginary back alleys and secret rooms in the company of a protagonist who is smart enough to know that it’s not very smart to mess with Big Brother, even with Uncle Sam, a Scottish rock-star/actor, and the spirit of Atatürk in your corner.”Locus
“An entertaining slice of near-future action […] certainly worth reading — and is far more than a placeholder that second volumes all too frequently end up being.”
“The story is well-paced. The opening, with the James Bond game, is as exciting as it should be […] DEEP STATE is immensely enjoyable.”