Secret Realms

In the first half of the next century, a band of warriors is raised from infancy in ignorance of the real world. Instead, they live in a virtual-reality environment of endless battle; they all become superb soldiers. Life is good for them, with continual challenges and no pain, an endless series of adventures demanding clever ploys, fast-moving conflicts, and intuitive and original strategies. They live from triumph to triumph.
But as war breaks out in the real world between Japan and China, the puppet masters who control their lives tighten the leash: their virtual scenarios become maps of reality, and their strategies are acted out by real battle units. But Cat, Trickster, Dreamer, Snake, and the others don't know it. All they have ever known is the endless settings of the virtual world.
And then one day they discover the real world, their bodies held prisoner in a secret military facility on an island in the Pacific. They decide to reclaim themselves and enter the real world, the real war. And the first thing they discover is pain.

Virtual-reality war-games yarn--something like The Lawnmower Man meets Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game--with some intriguing wrinkles of its own, from the author of the paperback Infectress. When child warriors Trickster, Cat, Snake, Dreamer and their colleagues enter Battle Space, they fight increasingly complex wars against a variety of ever more powerful foes; otherwise, they interact only with one another and with System, and wonder whether they're really only software. Trickster, though, begins to grasp that they're inside a VR system and have real bodies somewhere, and dreams of being able to destroy System. What they don't yet know is that they're a part of Standing Whirlwind, a project set up by China in order to train them as VR soldiers for the imminent showdown with the world's other superpower, Japan. As the war begins, a US warship wanders into the battle zone, while a huge typhoon obscures the progress of the fighting; helped by Iva, a project psychologist and actually Trickster's mother, Trickster and the others gain control of System. Trickster sends VR copies, or doppelgngers, of himself to subvert the Japanese computer network; meanwhile, he locates and reoccupies his physical body. Soon, he and the others break out and defeat their Chinese masters, but still must deal with Japanese commandos and US marines. Finally, Trickster gambles on being able to stop the war before it escalates into a nuclear holocaust. An impressively developed scenario in a yarn that emphasizes both the reality of violence and its emotional consequences: affecting and effective. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.