Book Review: Net Impact
I must admit that when I started reading Net Impact by Donald J. Bingle, I knew instantly that this was not my typical read. Usually, the espionage/mystery types aren’t my first choice, and when I began to read the first scene and felt as if I were inside Call of Duty Black Ops, I wasn’t sure if I’d make it through. While action-packed, I’ve always been one who would rather watch this in movies than read in a book.
But then the narrative itself began to pull me in, and I must say, I got hooked trying to figure out what was going on. The book is centered around Dick Thornby, who is a spy for a privately owned company known as the Subsidiary. Throughout the book, we see him deal with his biggest inner-quarrel, his growing absences at home due to his risky job. We empathize as he follows out his missions to save the world while attempting to not let the major family problems distract him.
In my opinion, the best part about Bingle’s work was the element of keeping things realistic, which he ends up mentioning in the Afterward, referring to his constant comments during spy movies about how unrealistic different things are. We see this with Thornby’s physical description as we are told he doesn’t look like what you would expect a spy to look like. Bingle keeps the reader inside the story because we are reminded throughout that things are done differently in the movies. Because of this, we feel more in touch with what’s going on, more in the moment, and we are less likely to second-guess Thornby’s ability to jump his bike of a dock or take down a warehouse when outnumbered eleven to one. This is a great quality in the book.
While the plot is heavy on the action and espionage, we are also introduced to the world of virtual reality that becomes a driving force of the book. We are first given hint to this nerdy element of the story when we meet Thornby’s estranged son Seth, who is addicted to computer games. But this becomes more and more central to the story when we meet Luke, the Subsidiary’s tech with a knack for gaming, specifically the game Reality 2 Be. We soon after learn that the same people Thornby and the Subsidiary are after are using this same virtual world to commit their crimes, putting the entire world at risk. Thornby and Luke are paired up and given the assignment to take down the servers of Reality 2 Be. Luke ends up teaching Thornby a lot about gaming, role-playing, and other things that seem foreign to the spy, and the story continues on, mashing explosions with mouse-clicking, nukes with flying avatars. The climax of the book actually ends up taking place partially in the virtual world itself.
Bingle also does a great job of keeping his research from blatantly blaring in our faces. During actions scenes, explanations of equipment, strategy, etc. are usually given to us through Thornby’s thoughts. When we’re learning about the virtual realm specifics and anything having to do at all with the technology used in the work, it’s usually because Luke is explaining it to Dick, who knows as much about computers as my grandfather. This gives us the ability to learn the specifics without being told them directly.
My only criticism is not with the book itself but rather the afterward in which Bingle explains that the book only uses some facts and exaggerates others, coming off as defensive of his work as he is critical of spy movies. This seems to assume that the reader has already judged. I personally read the entire novel without once thinking it was anything but fiction. Though I did find it interesting that some of the plot was based on facts, I think that this is all that I needed to know from the afterward. To go on the defensive seems to downplay the rest of the work, but as I stated earlier, I love it when research isn’t too obvious in a book, so perhaps this just seemed to take me a little too far out of the work of fiction itself, and it was the afterward after all. Despite this, the afterward even brought us back to the espionage theme, ending smoothly.
Net Impact was a great read and has completely changed my perspective on spy thrillers. I suppose I just needed that twist with gaming to really hook me, and Bingle does an exceptional job at converging the two completely different worlds. I’d recommend this quick read to anyone interested in either of those worlds.
