The novel's strengths lie in the authenticity it summons in dramatizing its exotic locales and journeys through electronic reality, as well as what must be called the emotional maturity of its characters and concerns. Gonzales's voyage to Halo - a complex, wholly artificial environment, densely imagined and beautifully described by Maddox - eventually involves him in a power struggle, a cybernetic breakthrough that betokens a new kind of consciousness, and the attainment of a degree of self-knowledge. The complications include the fact that the computer, Aleph, is part of a mile-wide space station called Halo, and that the scientist, a woman named Diana Heywood, is a former lover of the injured man and a former, perhaps embittered, employee of SenTrax. Gonzales's subsequent mission is to 'represent properly vested interests' in a project of unusual dimensions: the attempt to keep a neurologically damaged man alive by subsuming his cognitive functions into the 'machine space' of an advanced computer. The picture of his typical work that we get in the first chapter - Gonzales audits the suspicious accounts of a SenTrax subsidiary in Myanmar, and his return flight is attacked - suggests the corporate warfare venue that earlier cyberpunk has really covered quite thoroughly, but proves to be the only actual violence in the book. Gonzales - like Case, the hero of Neuromancer, he is known only by his surname even among friends - is a corporate operative for SenTrex, a huge multinational whose executives wield enormous wealth and power. The result is a strong if notably understated book.

A more accurate label might be Revisionist Cyberpunk, for Maddox's method is to examine, not unsympathetically, the implicit tenets of his predecessors, and then offer different, rather more thoughtful conclusions. This is not entirely fair, for Maddox has been publishing short fiction for several years (he is listed among the acknowledgements in William Gibson's Neuromancer, the prototype of this high-tech genre), and demonstrates expertise in his speculations that goes far beyond the surface crackle of Gibson or John Shirley.

TOM MADDOX'S Halo (Tor, $18.95) is a lean and intense adventure involving artificial intelligence, corporate intrigue, and virtual reality - themes familiar enough that a glib critic would not hesitate to categorize the book as late cyberpunk.

Larry niven halo