WEB WARRIORS: DIMENSION X

By: Chris Wyatt
Review Date: Friday, November 01, 2002

James Luceno is most identified with books that don't even bare his name. He co-authored the entire mass market paperback ROBOTECH series that was such a cult hit. Those books were done under the penname Jack McKinney (partly because they were done in collaboration with another author.) Luceno went on to make a name for himself with some heavy, dark and ponderous material like 1989's A FEARFUL SYMMETRY and 1990's almost vicious ILLEGAL ALIEN (which was released long before Robert J Sawyer decided to recycle the title for a completely different, though also good, novel).

In recent years Luceno has become a bestseller thanks to STAR WARS tie-in novels. The writer penned STAR WARS: CLOAK OF DECEPTION as well as two NEW JEDI ORDER entries.

Now Luceno is turning his attention to a new cyberpunk mystery series called WEB WARRIORS. This week the second WARRIORS volume hits shelves. Called DIMENSION X the book follows the continued adventures of two orphan prodigies who go by the hacker handles of Tech and Marz. The brothers deal with life in a dreary, late 21st century urban sprawl by turning their skills to the "Virtual Network".

The books are clearly intended for a young adult audience, even though publisher Del Rey makes no such notation anywhere on the covers. In fact, the book bares the normal Del Rey imprint. This is an extremely questionable marketing choice. Luceno has written some very complex and intellectually adult novels in the past. It would be easy for an adult reader to see Luceno's name, buy the book, and take it home only to find it too soft, simple and tame.

To further the problem the books are advertised as being "cyberpunk"-- a term that tends to call to mind the technological angst of Gibson, the violent sexuality of Womack and the challenging philosophies of Rucker. In fact, the rather hardboiled adult thriller ALTERED CARBON is an upcoming "cyberpunk" release under the Del Rey imprint. How are readers to know the difference between the kind of novel CARBON is, and the kind of novel WARRIORS is?

Admittedly, the DIMENSION X title is a little young adult-esque, and the length clocks in at a child-friendly 198 pages...but even so, Greg Bear's HEADS has a campy title, and it also runs about the same length...yet that esoterically grotesque little volume was definitely not written with young'uns in mind.


However, none of this marketing mumbo-jumbo has anything to do with Luceno's writing. The books, in a sense, are "cyberpunk-lite", or perhaps "cyberpunk jr"...but that doesn't mean they're not fun. In many ways HARRY POTTER broke down the walls between the YA and adult audiences in genre fiction.

Luceno has a real talent for creating snappy, kinetic text that jumps off the page, no matter the age of the reader.

In DIMENSION X we follow Tech, his brother and their friends (like the firebrand hottie Isis) as they dodge dangerous assassination attempts. A highly ranked virtual gamer and legendary hacker, Tech has jumped a barrier in cyberspace, called the "Escarpment". The barrier fences off corporate controlled sections of the net from anarchic sections, called "the Wilds." The "Escarpment" was previously thought to be unassailable, and many covert heavyweights would do anything to get their hands on the piece of code that Tech composed in order to make the unprecedented move.

Few criticisms can be leveled at Luceno's fast-moving story, page-turning dialogue and interesting characters.

But one of those few criticisms is this: he suffers from the same disorder that early nineties science journalists suffered...i.e. a bizarre compulsion to throw the prefix "cyber" in front of every word he can lay his hands on. "Cyberland." "CyberSquare." "Cyberchallenge." "Cyberjocks." "Cyber-environments." "Cyber-traffic." It seems like you can't go a few pages without a cyber-something-or-other. If the future is really that unimaginative with its vocabulary, I hope I'm long dead before it arrives.

But then Luceno isn't the first SF writer to succumb to prefix-oriented tendencies. Think about FOUNDATION. It's one of the most important SF novels ever written...but come on! Asimov is all, "space-car" this, and "atomic-gun" that. "I'm going to take my space-dog out for an atomic-walk" stuff like that...

So if even the great Asimov had that problem, you can't blame Luceno too much. Young adults, and young adults at heart, can count on DIMENSION X for a fast, fun, boyhood adventure.

Questions? Comments? Let us know what you think at feedback@cinescape.com.