Chi - Tapa blanda

In this wry conflagration of the karmic body, cyberspace and pet plants...Characters drift in and out of the deceptively leisurely plot, leaving trails of quirky humour and new age mythology. Right on. (SUNDAY EXPRESS)

Besher's writing is accomplished...You can almost smell the sultry heat of Thailand. (SFX)

Cyberpunk glitz and biotechnology blend with warped Eastern mysticism in Alexander Besher's loosely linked "Rim" sf series. This began with Rim, set in 2027, and continued with Mir--one of whose bizarre inventions was sentient tattoos. By the time of Chi it's 2038 and the world is even weirder. Vast bootlegging operations deal in chi, a life- force energy that can be technomagically sucked from unwilling victims and used to give rich addicts enhanced intelligence, great sex and even "short-time immortality". Meanwhile hackers break into Nature's equivalent of Internet, whose central node is a tree in Indonesia that channels telepathic e-mail to apes and others--including, of course, "win a million bananas" spams. Orang-utans are surgically and genetically remodelled into surrogate children for an increasingly infertile world: the human/ape species barrier is crumbling. A mysterious and decidedly offbeat variety of global spiritual transformation is threatened. Besher mixes surreal comedy, a spice of gruesomeness, and enough weird SF ideas for half a dozen books. (Under-shell deodorant for snails? Good grief.) The plot is a wild roller-coaster ride that ends with several loose threads and a shaggy-dog punchline. Great fun, but Chi promises slightly more than it delivers. (David Langford, AMAZON.CO.UK REVIEW)