Definitely looking forward to the next one of these. ( )

As with the previous installment of the Jump 225 trilogy, Multireal is written in a smooth prose, that is very comfortable to read.
The business and politics bits are also just as refreshing as before, with all the scheming, and a very interesting take on self governance with ideologically driven, membership constituencies called "creeds" and many more nice features - all of which were introduced in Infoquake, and maintained well in Multireal.

On the other hand, the many aspects of several technologies, including the MultiReal are still as jumbled and inconsistent, left without a proper justification(!) and as a result - misused by the author.
[If they truly manipulate the world on a quantum level in case of select technologies, and in case of ML - across parallel realities, - then the rest of the world is inadequately equipped/set up, and unjustifiably primitive in comparison. But if they don't, and use simpler technologies (like VR laced civilization maybe with elements of bio/nano manipulation) - then those aren't enough to explain many abilities/ occurrences described].
So that's still a bummer.

And finally, the story did get a bit draggy, and I felt than maybe this book should have been well condensed, split into two, having one part merged with previous volume, and another with the next.
I did like to read about characters other than the main one - but still, I felt a bit cheated, being led on by good prose, and awaiting for something significant to happen, only to realize that all the good stuff will probably happen in the next, final volume. ( )

Quite enjoyed this sequel to Infoquake. I'm looking forward to the next in the series, and hope that it concludes things in a way that the previous two books have not. Even with the lack of ending, I'm not sad I read this, as there are some fantastic (ie, good, but also fantasy-like) parts. The science in Edelman's science-fiction is sketchy at best, but he makes it quite readable none-the-less. ( )

I really liked Edelman's debut novel, Infoquake. However, I did not care for his 2008 follow-up, MultiReal. I felt like the author made a mistake splitting the story into thirds, trying to follow Magan Kai Lee, Jara, and Natch, instead of leaving Jara and the rest as glorified extras in a story about Natch. Every character was given short shrift, and the story was left feeling convoluted. Character motivations were defined through heavy-handed monologue, rather than through their actions, and I found myself generally disinterested in the story.

For me the first book was a page turner. However, Multireal was a chore to finish. It's left on a cliff hanger, but I don't find myself specifically caring what happens in the conclusion. ( )

I read (and sort of liked) part one of this trilogy, Infoquake. Got about 100 pages into MultiReal and thought, you know, there's really not enough here for three books. And I really don't want to be supporting that marketing ploy when it seems that's what it is: a ploy. There are plenty of singleton books out there worth buying and supporting, as well as good series. But this just seems like marketing to me. The story reminded me very much of the cyberpunk books of years back, especially "Snow Crash," which just celebrated it's 20th anniversary. There's not much here, in fact, that's original or interesting, or NEW. Many trite, worn-out cliches you've seen a zillion times elsewhere, such as the girl with the mad crush on our hero, who is a young Ender-like genius-rebel fighting against the Powers That Be, who are all bad, virtual reality, nanobots, etc. The prose reads like a graphic novel, with no depth. The dialogue is painful. And as another reviewer here notes, the eponymous tech MultiReal is neither believable nor is it something people would be killing each other over, in my opinion. If there was a real, living, breathing cut-throat business world being portrayed here, where the battlefields are in the boardrooms, well, yeah, maybe then. But the fact is that while the book(s) is nearly 1500 pages long, all told, we never see the world of the future, the people in it, what it's like to live in the world of this future. Compare to "River of Gods" by Ian McDonald, for instance. Now there's a fully-imagined future, extrapolated from our present in a very convincing way, peopled by real characters. MultiReal, on the other hand, was not worth reading. ( )