Strange Flesh A Novel

In this "complex, cutting-edge debut" for fans of Neal Stephenson and The Millennium Trilogy, a troubled hacker goes undercover to locate a vanished tech prodigy and finds himself at the center of a tantalizing, high-stakes revolution in virtual reality ( Publishers Weekly, starred review). Elite hacker and Harvard dropout James Pryce has received his most personal assignment yet. The woman who broke his heart ten years ago, Blythe Randall, hires him to locate her brother Billy and stop him from destroying their family's billion-dollar media empire with his erratic and increasingly violent stunts. Billy is a multi-media artist whose obsession is "the Bleed": the moment when real and virtual selves intersect, where actions in one life breed consequences in another. James soon learns that Billy has designed a lavish alternate reality game and seems to be recruiting players to pull off one last unimaginable real-life attack. In the course of tracking his target's last known whereabouts, James infiltrates GAME, a programming collective where a group of designers are at work on a top-secret invention that could revolutionize the virtual reality industry. James has to find Billy before his final plan is set in motion, but when the GAMErs invite him to their inner circle, his investigation takes a tantalizingand much more dangerousturn.

Michael Olson graduated from Harvard and worked in investment banking and software engineering before earning a master’s degree from NYU’s Interactive Technology Program, where he designed a locomotion interface for virtual environments.