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Realtime Interrupt
A man revivesafter blacking out in his garden to find himself in the body of a younger man named Joe. Original.
416 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
1 person is currently reading
158 people want to read
About the author
James P. Hogan
114 books268 followersJames Patrick Hogan was a British science fiction author.
Hogan was was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he worked various odd jobs until, after receiving a scholarship, he began a five-year program at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined the Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run its sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet. He quit DEC in 1979 and began writing full time, moving to Orlando, Florida, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California.
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually hard science fiction. In his earlier works he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, it is theory that should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded, and replaced.
Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete. For example, the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled nuclear fusion would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. In essence, energy would become free. This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage from Yesteryear (strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell's famous story "And Then There Were None"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
James Hogan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at his home in Ireland.
Hogan was was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he worked various odd jobs until, after receiving a scholarship, he began a five-year program at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined the Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run its sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet. He quit DEC in 1979 and began writing full time, moving to Orlando, Florida, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California.
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually hard science fiction. In his earlier works he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, it is theory that should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded, and replaced.
Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete. For example, the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled nuclear fusion would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. In essence, energy would become free. This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage from Yesteryear (strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell's famous story "And Then There Were None"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
James Hogan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at his home in Ireland.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
September 13, 2024
This is a pretty good AI/Matrix-before-the-movie/virtual reality story. It's a bit too long, as Hogan gets bogged down in details of inter-office conflict and politics in business, but the romance aspect and quest to find the truth of it all really is quite fascinating and engaging. Some of his hard-science details about computers from three decades past are outdated, but the questions he addresses are more relevant than ever. Note: the title has been confused numerous times with the excellent Vernor Vinge series, but obviously there's no connection.
August 25, 2017
Good book. Written in the first half of the 1990s, takes place in the early 2000s, read in 2017, and there's hardly an anachronism to be found, a commendable effort when writing a book dealing with computer AI and VR and the associated technology surrounding these ideas. At one point in the novel, they talk about the computers writing their own code to solve problems, something I've read recently in today's news. On top of that, I found this to be a compelling read, eager to pick up again every time I had to put the book down. Very good story, interesting enough characters, excellent tech portrayal. James Hogan is a favorite, and for some reason I keep forgetting he's dead. I guess being a couple decades behind in my reading does have some upside since I still have more of his work to read.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
February 14, 2018
Joe Corrigan was a scientist working with virtual reality systems and later with AI. He finds himself under psychiatric care after the failure of the project and his wife leaving him. After three years in an institution he is finally allowed to go out. None of the people he used to know are around any more. The people that he does meet seem a bit off. They say it's him, but they don't get a joke which he knows is funny. One day while working at his bartending job he finally meets another person like himself. Someone who understands thing without needing them explained. He's been in a simulation and finally met another human.
We start getting background. Joe is working for CLC in Pittsburgh they have a VR setup that allows people to play ping pong. We are told of his school days in Ireland and coming to America to broaden his knowledge and find a company in his field. Hogan traces through many steps in the virtual reality field, DIVAC, VIV, Pinocchio, P2, COSMOS and finally Oz. CLC has had to partner with the SDC in order to gain new technologies, and brought in new people from the outside to work and manage their part of the project. This causes a political struggle within the company. When it looks like they are going to put Tyron in charge of the project Corrigan comes up with an inspiration of how to add AI.
The chapters in simulation are really fun to read. The back story chapters may have been supposed to evoke more awe and wonder but some of it came off a bit too technical, but I was also anxious to get back to the present. The flashbacks set up the conflicts, Joe's character and I liked Joe and Evelyn's trip to California and Ireland. We see how Joe stars off as a motivated academic and changes into an ambitious project leader. How this changes affects his relationship with Evelyn. Twelve subjective years in simulation mellows his attitude and he regains his integrity. Can he get back to reality?
Overall a really fun stand alone novel.
We start getting background. Joe is working for CLC in Pittsburgh they have a VR setup that allows people to play ping pong. We are told of his school days in Ireland and coming to America to broaden his knowledge and find a company in his field. Hogan traces through many steps in the virtual reality field, DIVAC, VIV, Pinocchio, P2, COSMOS and finally Oz. CLC has had to partner with the SDC in order to gain new technologies, and brought in new people from the outside to work and manage their part of the project. This causes a political struggle within the company. When it looks like they are going to put Tyron in charge of the project Corrigan comes up with an inspiration of how to add AI.
The chapters in simulation are really fun to read. The back story chapters may have been supposed to evoke more awe and wonder but some of it came off a bit too technical, but I was also anxious to get back to the present. The flashbacks set up the conflicts, Joe's character and I liked Joe and Evelyn's trip to California and Ireland. We see how Joe stars off as a motivated academic and changes into an ambitious project leader. How this changes affects his relationship with Evelyn. Twelve subjective years in simulation mellows his attitude and he regains his integrity. Can he get back to reality?
Overall a really fun stand alone novel.
October 30, 2019
A good, pre-Matrix, simulated reality sci-fi. The beginning really drags, the end is quite snappy. The foreshadowing is obvious, the character building is brutal. It hasn't aged well and the authors sense of "near future" (which is now past) didn't advance much. Fun read despite those issues but this one is not destined to be a classic.
October 18, 2019
Excellent story about a man trapped inside his own AI world without realising it.
As it Hogan's wont, there's a fair bit of science (dry but not dull) combined with interesting and unusual characters.
Realtime Interrupt could really work as a limited series TV show.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
As it Hogan's wont, there's a fair bit of science (dry but not dull) combined with interesting and unusual characters.
Realtime Interrupt could really work as a limited series TV show.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
April 8, 2021
Another excellent science fiction novel from James P. Hopan. I give it 4 plus. Excellent created and believable persons in the novel and a really good plot.
April 25, 2010
I've been rereading some old books recently deciding what to keep in my library, and recently read again two other novels by Hogan, and both made me wonder what I had liked in him, but this one reminded me why I do have several of his books on the shelves, even if in the end it's not a keeper. Starchild was disappointing and with Mirror Maze I found the political themes heavy handed, but Realtime Interrupt is a good yarn, more in the classic hard science fiction vein. In fact there's some dry, scientifically sophisticated material here about computers, artificial intelligence and the nature of humanity and reality. At the same time Joe Corrigan makes a good protagonist. He's largely likeable, sometimes roguishly charming, and has a true emotional arc through the events of the story. This reminds me somewhat of Charles Platt's The Silicon Man, another tale of virtual reality with similar themes, but more on a personal than political level. Hogan lived for some time in Ireland--Corrigan is a native, and there are some scenes set there, and Hogan depicts the Irish with affection and without affectation. And the last lines left me smiling. Not a classic, but definitely a good read for anyone interested in this theme looking for an entertaining work of science fiction.
March 10, 2014
One of the very best Hogan Hard SF novels. Although written in 1995 all of the AI and virtual reality and brain scan speculation holds up as well as the business and marketing practices. Many will find that the details of the business practices and the technology get in the way of the story but this is technological speculation of the highest order of how to achieve full AI, virtual reality and simulated real world projections. Hogan's strengths of plot and old-fashioned story telling with informed speculation are on display while it pretty much avoids his weakness for crank science. The writing and characters while not inspired are serviceable.
"How is the victim of a successful suicide supposed to feel? . . . Not bad, considering, I guess."
"How is the victim of a successful suicide supposed to feel? . . . Not bad, considering, I guess."
January 13, 2013
Gee, the story line is fascinating, but the author spent so much time on the real world office politics behind the new virtual world that it dragged on and dragged on... and then like a bad mystery novel I'd figured out the solution 200 pages before the protagonist, at which point waiting for the punch line dragged on and dragged on....
If you like office political fiction more than science fiction this could be the book for you!
If you like office political fiction more than science fiction this could be the book for you!
January 12, 2013
Although the premise of this story is extraordinary, even for science fiction, the scientific detail makes it a challenging process to harvest the message.
Corrigan, a brilliant young scientist thinks his project--teaching robots how to make decisions like humans by interacting with humans in a virtual environment--will make him rich and famous. Instead, it takes him much deeper into the project than he ever intended and teaches him what is more valuable than success.
Corrigan, a brilliant young scientist thinks his project--teaching robots how to make decisions like humans by interacting with humans in a virtual environment--will make him rich and famous. Instead, it takes him much deeper into the project than he ever intended and teaches him what is more valuable than success.
June 22, 2009
This is truly one of my favourite Hogan novels. partly for the reality of the virtual reality, but partly for the emotional development. Corrigan loses much of his ambition as the novel proceeds, and for anyone so dedicated to their work that they'd backstab even their friends, it's certainly a worthwhile read. the AI stuff is quite good, too...
June 18, 2012
Hogan has written an enjoyable, if not gripping, story about virtual reality which addresses Philip K. Dick's perennial question, "How do I know the world around me is real, rather than a dream or simulation?" It addresses that question and the associated philosophical concerns with relative clarity.
January 4, 2013
Interesting concepts. Plot is somewhat predictable, though. That said, the simulation sounds like a wonderful place to visit and looking at the internet, the possibilities would be endless
March 21, 2013
Some slow parts, but the way they play into the plot later makes it worth it.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews