Chameleon

A slipstream fable about tough love, mind control, and true choices.

Chameleon is a literate technothriller, both gritty and poetic, about virtual reality and the consequences of choice. Blending psychological suspense and magic realism with sci-fi tropes of alternate timelines, artificial intelligence, mind control, corporate conspiracy, and astral projection, this noir nod to slipstream and cyberpunk traces the quest of Joe Norton for survival, sanity, and love.

Released in an earlier edition as PsyBot, this rewritten novel is recast in Vancouver in 1992, when high-tech was set for takeoff, as a throwback to the cyberpunk era. It’s a retro dive into the underworld of mind-control black ops, and a literate interface with emerging transhumanist technologies and agendas.

The middlebrow hero of this offbeat, surrealistic narrative rides a bizarre cybernetic mind-bender, a hacked program set to unleash on an unsuspecting world. Chameleon is both speculative technothriller and psychological character study. Its themes comprise personal growth and corporate machination; its prose conveys both gritty description and eloquent quest. The use of genre elements—alien abduction, offworld travel, astral projection—is effectively ironic, introduced by the rogue computer virus to tempt and tease, to call into question the arbitrary fabric of every virtual reality we yearn for or claim to inhabit.

Book Categories: fiction.