The Demi-Monde: Winter by Rod Rees

A bit later this month, I'll be participating in the TLC tour for Rod Rees's The Shadow Wars, the second installment in the Demi-Monde quadrilogy, which was the prefect opportunity for me to jump into the first book of the series -- one that's been languishing in my TBR for way too long!

The Demi-Monde was created as a hyper-real military training module. While many training ops are too controlled and unable to produce a real experience, the Demi-Monde is designed to be the exact opposite. After initial programming to include some of the world's most evil sociopaths, the Demi-Monde was designed to learn. Situations are unpredictable and "players" are unaware of any other reality. To die in the Demi-Monde is to die in real life. When the president's daughter enters the Demi-Monde and is taken captive, the military is forced to send in a civilian to rescue her. Ella Thomas desperately needs the money but nothing can truly prepare her for the reality of the Demi-Monde. But Ella is clever and she is armed with two huge advantages: first, she's been armed with the knowledge of the reality she's come from. Second, she's tapped into the Demi-Monde's programming. And Ella will need all the help she can get if she's to survive and complete her mission.

Rod Rees's debut is a kind of brilliantly conceived story. It's a combination of science fiction and alternate history set in a totally Matrix-like world. For me, it works as long as I don't think too hard about it. And that's what I think a lot of science fiction is -- diving in and taking the author's word for it. It wasn't all that difficult considering Rees does a great job of making his world believable. Even if you have difficulty wrapping your head around the idea of the Demi-Monde, the characters that populate this alternate world are fantastic in every regard, helping to make the world that much more realistic.

Ella and Vanka are, of course, the stars of the show. Ella is thrust into this world and immediately acclimates. Of course being armed with the knowledge of her own world and history is of great use, especially considering she's put into a world that flourishes through adopting every bad political, racist, sexist, and religious idea out there.

Vanka is a mystery even to Ella, which leads me to believe that there will be some possibly quite interesting revelations about him to come in further installments. He's a bit of a ladies man but the chemistry between him and Ella builds fabulously.

Aside from them, we also have Trixie Dashwood, a bit of a high society gal who's got some unpopular ideas that could mean trouble for her father; Aleister Crowley serves as just one of the big bads in the Demi-Monde; Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the ForthRight and a pretty heinous character; and a slew of others both fictional and based in history.

As I mentioned, this is just the first in a series of four and there is a pretty HUGE cliffhanger ending. I can't wait to get to Shadow World now. You can look for my post in the TLC book tour on March 18.

Rating: 3.5/5

Pre-Pub Book Buzz: The Demi-Monde: Winter by Rod Rees

Ooh, I can't wait for this one! The Demi-Monde: Winter is the first in a series of four steampunk thrillers by Rod Rees. We're a bit behind the UK, who released this first installment a while ago. I believe book two, Spring, is already out there as well. At any rate, Winter hits shelves stateside on Tuesday, December 27 (just in time for those holiday gift cards!).

Here's what the publisher is saying:

In the Demi-Monde, author Rod Rees has conjured up a terrifying virtual reality, a world dominated by history’s most ruthless and bloodthirsty psychopaths—from Holocaust architect Reinhard Heydrich to Torquemada, the Spanish Inquisition’s pitiless torturer, to Josef Stalin’s bloodthirsty right-hand man/monster, the infamous Beria. The Demi-Monde: Winter kicks off a brilliant, high concept series that blends science fiction and thriller, steampunk and dystopian vision. If Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson, James Rollins, and Clive Cussler participated in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, the result might be something akin to the dark and ingenious madness of Rees’s The Demi-Monde: Winter.

And here's more:

The Demi-Monde:

1. A subclass of society whose members embrace a decadent lifestyle and evince loose morals.

2. A shadow world where the norms of civilized behavior have been abandoned.

3. A massive multiple-player simulation technology that re-creates in a wholly realistic cyber-milieu the threat-ambiance and no-warning aspects of a hi-intensity, deep-density, urban Asymmetric Warfare Environment.

4. Hell.

Welcome to the Demi-Monde, the ultimate in virtual reality—a military training ground and vivid, simulated world of cruelty and chaos run by psychopaths, madmen and fanatics.

If you die here, you die in the Real World . . .

In the year 2018, the Demi-Monde is the most sophisticated, complex and unpredictable computer simulation ever created, devised specifically to train soldiers for the nightmarish reality of urban warfare. A virtual world of eternal civil conflict, its thirty million inhabitants—“Dupes”—are ruled by cyber-duplicates of some of history’s cruelest tyrants: the fanatical Nazi butcher Reinhard Heydrich; Stalin’s arch executioner Lavrentii Beria; the torture-loving Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada; the Reign of Terror’s bloodthirsty mastermind Maximilien Robespierre.

But something has gone horribly wrong inside the Demi-Monde, and the U.S. president’s daughter, Norma, has been lured into this terrifying shadow world, only to be trapped there. Her last hope of rescue is Ella Thomas, an eighteen-year-old jazz singer and very reluctant heroine. But when Ella infiltrates the Demi-Monde and begins her hunt for Norma, she soon discovers the walls containing the evils of this simulated environment are dissolving—and the Real World is in far more danger than anyone knows. With the help of resistors determined to understand their world, Ella must race to save Norma and stop an apocalypse . . . but the clock is ticking.

Blending fact and fantasy, history and religion, military and existential themes, epic adventure and dark wit, dystopia and steampunk in a wholly original and driving narrative stream, The Demi-Monde: Winter is inventive fiction at its finest.

I'm totally stoked! I think this looks like one of the coolest books of the season!

You can visit the official site at the link above. Or you can visit Harper Collins's book page here and you can read a sample of the book here on Scribd.

I'm hitting the books. Hope you enjoy your Saturday!