Second paragraph of third chapter:
There was lots of time for Matt to do what he intended and then get on to his homework.
A YA novel, the first in a sequence related to the series of Net Force novels (and TV movie) by Tom Clancy, published in 1998 but set in 2025. I think I probably got enough of a flavour from this not to need to try out the rest of the series of 18 books. Our protagonist, Matt Hunter, tracks down a bunch of hackers who are not only disrupting important cultural events like baseball games, but also infiltrating embassies in Washington and stealing information. The virtual world in this version of 2025 is much more hologrammy and immersive than we have actually managed to generate in real life. It’s the least dystopian future of any of the books and films set on Earth in 2025 that I have tried so far – the future of John Varley’s Titan also seems fairly rosy, but it’s set among the moons of Saturn. You can get it here.
Set in 2025:
Television: The Outer Limits: The Duplicate Man (1964)
Film: Endgame (Bronx lotta finale) (1983); Future Hunters (1986); Futuresport (1998); Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision (2003)
Novels: 334 (1972); Titan (1979); The Running Man (1982); The Lake at the End of the World (1988); Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals (1998); A Friend of the Earth (2000); The Peshawar Lancers (2002)
Comics: The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap (1986); Superman & Batman: Generations III #2: Doomsday Minus One (2003)
