The new millennium has brought a flood of exciting thrillers about interrelated secrets: cryptic codes, religious mysteries, clandestine conspiracies, and secret histories. These include Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code; Jane Jensen's Dante's Equation; and Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. To their impressive ranks add Howard Hendrix's idea-packed novel The Labyrinth Key, which explores the relationships between cryptography and the Inquisition, cybertech and the Kabbalah, and quantum physics and life after death.

Brilliant researcher Jaron Kwok is working to develop a quantum computer, which could crack any cryptographic code, while creating code uncrackable by all other computers. Whoever invents the first quantum computer will permanently win the twenty-first-century Cold War between China and the U.S. Then Kwok, an American, disappears from his Hong Kong hotel room, leaving behind only ashes and melted computer equipment. Has Kwok been killed, or kidnapped? Or has he succeeded in creating the quantum computer, and disappeared with it into another universe? The Cold War heats up as another brilliant American researcher, Benjamin Cho, and a relentless Chinese police detective, Marilyn Lu, race to solve the mystery, though its solution may destroy not only the world, but the universe--and, perhaps, an infinitude of alternative universes. --Cynthia Ward


From Publishers Weekly
In this busy tale of near-future virtual reality and real-life espionage, Hendrix (Empty Cities of the Full Moon) mixes Renaissance Kabbalism, quantum computing and the memory techniques of a 16th-century Jesuit priest into a narrative of secret societies and spy agencies fighting to shape the course of human evolution. The disappearance of historian Jaron Kwok in China sets the Asian superpower and America on a collision course. Kwok's college roommate and now replacement, Ben Cho, is charged by his NSA superiors with finding out what the historian discovered in the old files of a CIA China expert. Meanwhile, Hong Kong detective Lu Mei-lin ("Marilyn Lu") struggles to solve Kwok's strange vanishing act, working on the only clue left behind, a pile of nanotech ashes. Hendrix plays with the concept of labyrinths and mazes as devices that both hide and reveal. The book features abstruse speculation on memory and forgetting, on the making and breaking of secrets and the mind's ability to manipulate the quantum nature of reality. Unfortunately, the earnestness of conspiracy theory punctures the dizzying metaphysical bubbles Hendrix blows, leaving the story a bit flat. And in an infinitude of infinite universes, where everything occurs, tragedy loses its significance and sting. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Jaron Kwok works for the U.S. government in a race with China to create a quantum computer capable of easily cracking an opponent's codes. Jaron is on the verge of a breakthrough when his virtuality spreads across the globe and renders him a pile of ashes in a Hong Kong hotel room. China and the U.S. are both desperate to discover what happened and what Jaron had been on the verge of. Ben Cho, Jaron's assigned successor (more intimately successive than anyone suspects), Chinese investigator Marilyn Lu, and others are dragged into a power struggle in the shadows of government, and into a forensic mystery that works out most unexpectedly when Kwok's remains turn out to be biotech nanoware. Layers of secret ruling societies, interconnections between historical cryptography and the work of the tale's own cutting-edge scientists (including everything from Matteo Ricci's memory palaces to the Cabala), and an unexpected danger to reality combine with political scheming in this tight thriller with a clever historical basis. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"Hendrix's sentences have punch, his plots have points, and he knows his science--what more can one ask of cutting edge science fiction?"
—Gregory Benford, physicist and Nebula Award-winning author of Timescape

"One of the very best novelists writing in science fiction today."
—Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of The Years of Rice and Salt

"Stephen Hawking meets Tom Clancy! Quantum physics and international intrigue combine in the best novel yet by the finest new SF writer of the last decade. Howard V. Hendrix's THE LABYRINTH KEY is the book everyone will be talking about this year, not just in science-fiction circles, but also in the halls of power in Washington."
—Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Hominids

"With the hip fecundity of Neal Stephenson, the speculative acuity of John Brunner, and the suspense-building audacity of John LeCarre, Howard Hendrix fashions a science-fiction thriller that's truly twenty-first-century in its tone, subject matter and style. Blending metaphysics with quantum physics, THE LABYRINTH KEY explores a possible future fusion of magic and science that is truly revolutionary. Hopping from exotic real-world locales to even more outré virtualities, this tale will keep the reader guessing till its climax.”
—Paul DiFilippo, author of Fuzzy Dice and A Mouthful of Tongues

"If Robert Ludlum or Eric Ambler had written a science fiction novel, then it might have resembled THE LABYRINTH KEY. An intriguing thriller, it's also first-rate speculation: a masterful blend of genres. If you searching for thought-provoking novel, this shouldn't be missed."
—Alan Steele, Hugo Award-winning author of Chronospace

“ONE OF THE VERY BEST NOVELISTS WRITING IN SCIENCE FICTION TODAY.”
—KIM STANLEY ROBINSON, award-winning author of the Mars Trilogy

“One could almost imagine that some of the action sequences of this novel were written by Tom Clancy, while some of the scientific discussions remind one of Gregory Benford, and two sequences involving hiking in the Sierra Nevadas could have been written by Kim Stanley Robinson. The past few years have spawned several other novels of cryptology and secret histories, most notably Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, but Hendrix has been perhaps the most successful incorporating such concepts into a hard-SF context.”–Off the Shelf, SciFi.com


Review
"Hendrix's sentences have punch, his plots have points, and he knows his science--what more can one ask of cutting edge science fiction?"
?Gregory Benford, physicist and Nebula Award-winning author of Timescape

"One of the very best novelists writing in science fiction today."
?Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of The Years of Rice and Salt

"Stephen Hawking meets Tom Clancy! Quantum physics and international intrigue combine in the best novel yet by the finest new SF writer of the last decade. Howard V. Hendrix's THE LABYRINTH KEY is the book everyone will be talking about this year, not just in science-fiction circles, but also in the halls of power in Washington."
?Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Hominids

"With the hip fecundity of Neal Stephenson, the speculative acuity of John Brunner, and the suspense-building audacity of John LeCarre, Howard Hendrix fashions a science-fiction thriller that's truly twenty-first-century in its tone, subject matter and style. Blending metaphysics with quantum physics, THE LABYRINTH KEY explores a possible future fusion of magic and science that is truly revolutionary. Hopping from exotic real-world locales to even more outré virtualities, this tale will keep the reader guessing till its climax.?
?Paul DiFilippo, author of Fuzzy Dice and A Mouthful of Tongues

"If Robert Ludlum or Eric Ambler had written a science fiction novel, then it might have resembled THE LABYRINTH KEY. An intriguing thriller, it's also first-rate speculation: a masterful blend of genres. If you searching for thought-provoking novel, this shouldn't be missed."
?Alan Steele, Hugo Award-winning author of Chronospace

?ONE OF THE VERY BEST NOVELISTS WRITING IN SCIENCE FICTION TODAY.?
?KIM STANLEY ROBINSON, award-winning author of the Mars Trilogy


From the Inside Flap
In a secret war waged in worlds both virtual and real, the fates of nations depend on the definitive weapon. And that weapon is knowledge—knowledge to die for. . . .

The race is heating up between the U.S. and China to develop a quantum computer with infinite capabilities to crack any enemy’s codes, yet keep secure its own secrets. The government that achieves this goal will win a crucial prize. No other computer system will be safe from the reach of this master machine.

Dr. Jaron Kwok was working for the U.S. government to build such a computer. But in a posh hotel in Hong Kong, a Chinese policewoman sifts through the bizarre, ashlike remains of what’s left of the doctor. With the clock ticking, alliances will be forged—and there are those who will stop at nothing to discover what the doctor knew. As the search for answers intensifies, it becomes chillingly clear that the quantum computer both sides so desperately want will be more powerful, more dangerous than anyone could have ever imagined.

For in the twenty-first century, machines become gods, gods become machines, and the once-impossible now lies within reach. The key to unlimited knowledge will create the ultimate weapon of mass destruction—or humanity’s last chance to save itself. . . .


From the Back Cover
"Hendrix's sentences have punch, his plots have points, and he knows his science--what more can one ask of cutting edge science fiction?"
-Gregory Benford, physicist and Nebula Award-winning author of Timescape

"One of the very best novelists writing in science fiction today."
–Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of The Years of Rice and Salt

"Stephen Hawking meets Tom Clancy! Quantum physics and international intrigue combine in the best novel yet by the finest new SF writer of the last decade. Howard V. Hendrix's THE LABYRINTH KEY is the book everyone will be talking about this year, not just in science-fiction circles, but also in the halls of power in Washington."
–Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Hominids

"With the hip fecundity of Neal Stephenson, the speculative acuity of John Brunner, and the suspense-building audacity of John LeCarre, Howard Hendrix fashions a science-fiction thriller that's truly twenty-first-century in its tone, subject matter and style. Blending metaphysics with quantum physics, THE LABYRINTH KEY explores a possible future fusion of magic and science that is truly revolutionary. Hopping from exotic real-world locales to even more outré virtualities, this tale will keep the reader guessing till its climax.”
–Paul DiFilippo, author of Fuzzy Dice and A Mouthful of Tongues

"If Robert Ludlum or Eric Ambler had written a science fiction novel, then it might have resembled THE LABYRINTH KEY. An intriguing thriller, it's also first-rate speculation: a masterful blend of genres. If you searching for thought-provoking novel, this shouldn't be missed."
–Alan Steele, Hugo Award-winning author of Chronospace


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE

DOUBTING THOMAS JEFFERSYNTH

Cybernesia

The annual Pilot’s Festival was well underway at Don Sturm’s and Karuna Drang’s place, though their “place” was a DIVE— a deep-immersion virtual environment—and their DIVE wasn’t a place at all. Sturm and Drang weren’t their legal names, either, and they hadn’t physically cohabited for months.

Not that it mattered much. At the moment Karuna Drang was discarnately embodying herself as spritely Sally Hemmings, slave and mistress. Though her portrayal was relatively accurate, Don Sturm’s morbidly thoughtful and conflicted Thomas Jefferson was quite different from the historical founding father, and his halo of neon blue hair wasn’t exactly “period.” But blue hair was one of Don’s personal signatures in meatlife, and he hadn’t been able to resist.

All around them, virtual party people—likewise electronically embodied in eighteenth-century drag—danced and cavorted about the grounds of a mimetic Monticello. Alternating between the forms of an aggressively ambiguous nymph and its counterpart satyr-o- maniac, Medea ?rate chased bewigged men in breeches, then pursued women who proved surprisingly light-footed, given their voluminous dresses and titanic coiffures.

Normally Don’s default virtualscape was Easter Island, so his Jeffersonian estate boasted moai, the great-headed statues, as lawn and garden sculptures around which the laughing would-be orgiasts darted, disappearing from view—only to reappear as a tangled ball of licking, sucking, nibbling, stroking, rutting sexual gymnasts, Medea lodged in their midst.

Don/Thomas shook his head.

“I know that’s how they pull off their grand data exchanges,” he said to Karuna/Sally. “And I’m sure what they’re doing in virtual space is only a metaphor, but I still wish they’d make use of a more subtle metaphor.”

Karuna/Sally laughed

“ ‘To hack is to explore and manipulate’,” she said, imitating Medea’s lyrical-as-Pan, shrill-as-Bacchante manner of speaking. “ ‘To enter and be entered. Like foreplay and sex, like parasite and host, n’est-ce pas?’ ”

Don frowned. Music sounded around them. The Jed Astaires, a retro-urbane bluegrass group, played danceable new arrangements of works by Revolutionary War–era tunesmith William Billings. In the sky above them, sunset’s salmon-colored clouds flickered and transformed into shoals of swimming salmon, then morphed back to clouds again.

“You look preoccupied,” Karuna/Sally said. “Even e-bodied, I can tell. What’s on your mind?”

“Just looking over what we’ve wrought,” Don/Tom said, gazing out at their Colonial Williamsburg-meets-Polynesia surroundings. On their personal channel, he turned down the volume of the Astaires’ musical variations. “Not to say that it’s overwrought, mind you. Just that the nature of this event is somewhat paradoxical.”

“How so?”

“Well, it feels as if I’ve usurped a public event just to celebrate a personal success, and either way the celebrants don’t know what they’re celebrating.”

“Don, you have every right to celebrate! Prime Privacy Protocol is a winner. It’s on its way to becoming the most popular encryption software in the infosphere.”

“Even if no one associates my name with it. . . .”

“Yes, but you, ‘Mister Obololos,’ you’re the one who made it happen.”

“Maybe that anonymity’s a good thing. The law enforcement types are getting really shrill in condemning it. Today there was an op-ed piece in the New York Times that accused P-Cubed of catering to the privacy interests of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse. The consensus seems to be that its primary users will be drug dealers, terrorists, organized crime, and pedophiles—”

“—along with about a billion other ordinary citizens. Come on, don’t let it get to you. Nobody falls for that shtick anymore.”

“Maybe. But that’s not really what’s bugging me, you know? It’s this shindig, this construct.”

“And your point is—?”

“This whole virtual space is called Cybernesia. But what is Cybernesia, really? A space that’s not a place? An event without a time? Both?”

Sally/Karuna frowned, then gestured, and a palmtop oracle appeared as a first edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.

“Here—let’s consult the word of a higher authority. The great dictionaries and encyclopedias refer to Cybernesia as ‘the semipermanent archipelago of “pirate islands” located in the net.’ Or this: ‘DIVEs whose stability amid chaos is created by the same forces that produce the turmoil around them.’ Kind of like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Islands offshore, neighbors to the conventional continents of the infosphere. Freer spaces, like the Bahamas or the Florida Keys. Good enough?”

“I guess it’ll have to be,” Don’s faux Jefferson said with a shrug, “but what has me most worried is this program you wrote, that lets everybody here fuse their own separate islands into a single, temporary continent. Doesn’t that change the rules? Or break them outright? What if we’ve altered the structure of the infosphere to such a degree that we come up on the authorities’ radar? They might check into it, and find out that I’m the one who put together P-Cubed . . .

“Are we putting everybody here in danger?”

“Honey, I’d never be naive enough to tell anybody, ‘You think too much,’ ” Karuna said with a wicked little smile, “but sometimes the life of the mind—”

“—is a pain in the ass. I know.”

“Snap out of it!” she said, smiling and giving him a quick kiss on the cheek, a whisper of electrons brushing his face across the void of simulation. For an instant Don deeply missed being with her, until he remembered the painful last months of their romance. “Quit pattern-phreaking and enjoy yourself a little.” she persisted. “Look how well the party’s going. That patch you wrote for the clouds looks great, and no matter what you say, the breakthrough that allowed everybody to fly their islands here was a work of genius. Straight out of Gulliver’s Travels! You should be proud.”

Don/Tom allowed himself a small, reluctant smile, but he still worried. The flying islands were just an expansion of the Besterian jauntbox program, really. Besterboxes allowed participants to step fluidly from one virtual reality to another, but no one had used the tech to combine such large and disparate elements into a single mass before—not even temporarily. Despite the fact that things were going well, he wondered what complex and unpredictable dynamics might be generated by the impromptu experiment they were conducting.

The Jed Astaires launched into their rendition of “The World Turned Upside Down”—a march played by Cornwallis’s troops when they surrendered their arms at Yorktown in 1781. Don/Tom looked up at the clouds again. A new, perfectly pyramidal island flew toward them.

Odd. Everybody who had been invited had already shown or sent their regrets. A party crasher? Or was this some unintended side effect of toying with Cybernesian dynamics? He hoped it wasn’t the infocops, come to bust their party.

No sooner did the island land in the bay and fuse with the rest of the temporary Cybernesian continent than the pyramid opened and some sort of holographic broadcast filled the sky. As if the entire world were, in fact, a stage, two characters appeared.

Don frantically searched his infosphere links, even checking Cybernesia’s South American backup servers in Tri-Border, in an effort to determine what the hell was going on. As he searched, his guests watched a gun-toting parachutist land in a garden among the clouds, listened to the parachutist and his paramour exchanging banter overloaded with allusions. The Cybernesia party ground to a halt.

The intruder-program and its characters morphed chaotically into heavily armed superscientists casually talking shop amid attacks by ninjoid commandoes.

Don’s searching yielded no answers.

“Isn’t this simulation a bit unusual, honey?” Karuna/Sally asked Don. “This doesn’t seem like you.”

“It’s not me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m not doing it. In fact, I’m trying to jam the holo-cast. Block the signal, somehow.”

“Any luck?”

“None whatsoever.”

In the sky above, Biblical garden imagery collided with laboratory milieu. Don, meanwhile, attempted to filter the broadcast out of Cybernesian virtuality, but found himself thwarted at every turn.

In the intruder holo-cast, high-tech death accompanied talk of “wellness plagues” and population-ratcheting. Speculative scientific scenarios were punctuated by explosions.

Soon the pair who had crashed his party were caught up in a chaotic, apocalyptic maelstrom of eclipsing suns and rumbling thunder. Nightmarish fighter aircraft screamed above, firing missiles and dropping bombs in a battle among the clouds.

“Great sim-within-a-sim!” said a Medusa-haired Medea ?rate, sidling up to Don and Karuna in the party zone. “A bit anachronistic, though, isn’t it?”

Don frowned. Medea was e-bodied in a manner entirely too buxom, especially since, in meatlife, “she” was purported to be a skinny, crotchety old South Asian named Indahar Marwani.

Yeah, right, he thought. How much did any of them really know about the Ambiguous One?

“As I was just telling m’lady here, I’m not doing it.”

“Then who is?” Medea asked. Something rang false in the way she intoned the question.

“I don’t know. It may be an unanticipated effect of our having joined these islands together.”

“Ho-ho.” Medea laughed. “You mean the pirates have been pirated? How rich!”

In the chaotic world among the clouds, the man and woman ran and leapt for cover without even bothering to pause in their philosophical conversation.

“Wait a minute!” Karuna said to Don and Medea. “I think I know who the male character is! I recognize the underlayment. It’s that guy, what’s his name—Lok, or Kwok. The one who contacted us about the deep hack. The work we did for him is what gave me the idea for the island-merging software.”

Above them, the eclipse of the intruder-sun in the intruder-sky deepened. Lightning forked down out of distant clouds.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The race is heating up between the U.S. and China to develop a quantum computer with infinite capabilities to crack any enemy's codes, yet keep secure its own secrets. The government that achieves this goal will win a crucial prize. No other computer system will be safe from the reach of this master machine." "Dr. Jaron Kwok was working for the U.S. government to build such a computer. But in a posh hotel in Hong Kong, a Chinese policewoman sifts through the bizarre, ashlike remains of what's left of the doctor. With the clock ticking, alliances will be forged - and there are those who will stop at nothing to discover what the doctor knew. As the search for answers intensifies, it becomes chillingly clear that the quantum computer both sides so desperately want will be more powerful, more dangerous than anyone could have ever imagined." For in the twenty-first century, machines become gods, gods become machines, and the once-impossible now lies within reach. The key to unlimited knowledge will create the ultimate weapon of mass destruction - or humanity's last chance to save itself.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

In this busy tale of near-future virtual reality and real-life espionage, Hendrix (Empty Cities of the Full Moon) mixes Renaissance Kabbalism, quantum computing and the memory techniques of a 16th-century Jesuit priest into a narrative of secret societies and spy agencies fighting to shape the course of human evolution. The disappearance of historian Jaron Kwok in China sets the Asian superpower and America on a collision course. Kwok's college roommate and now replacement, Ben Cho, is charged by his NSA superiors with finding out what the historian discovered in the old files of a CIA China expert. Meanwhile, Hong Kong detective Lu Mei-lin ("Marilyn Lu") struggles to solve Kwok's strange vanishing act, working on the only clue left behind, a pile of nanotech ashes. Hendrix plays with the concept of labyrinths and mazes as devices that both hide and reveal. The book features abstruse speculation on memory and forgetting, on the making and breaking of secrets and the mind's ability to manipulate the quantum nature of reality. Unfortunately, the earnestness of conspiracy theory punctures the dizzying metaphysical bubbles Hendrix blows, leaving the story a bit flat. And in an infinitude of infinite universes, where everything occurs, tragedy loses its significance and sting. (Mar. 30) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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