Unsurprisingly, the rich and powerful look for ways to preserve themselves and their agendas no matter what the rules, while ordinary people take advantage of universally accessible virtual environments, and everyone anticipates the pending transition from Dreamtime to Primetime, a more comprehensive level of virtual experience.

Against this background plays out the complicated story of Wilbur Hart, CEO of Hart Media International, cloned three times before undergoing a "Crossover" into an Immortal Moravic Model, or "Immordel ... a physically superior artificial body ... implanted with the self-evolving matrix of its human model." However, the Immordel Hart behaves unexpectedly, forming an alliance with computer genius Tohashi Mu to subvert the goals of the Viracocha Project and its plans for a "seedship" of the elite to travel into space to begin a "celestial civilization."

Meanwhile, an individual associated with Hart named Benito Cortezar pursues his own agenda as he discovers increasing correlations between the events and images of Dreamtime and his own personal history while becoming increasingly entangled with a young woman, Mercury Blue, who pursues a deceptive agenda of her own following the violent death of her brother. All parties eventually have to deal with the presence of rogue Primers, representatives of Posthuman Adaptive Technology whose interactions with the projections of "actual" humans threaten to destroy the bridge between Realtime and Primetime.

A heady stew, perhaps overly seasoned

David Memmott's first novel is a complicated tale whose large cast of characters and breathless plotline may prove taxing even to the most attentive reader. The book's chapters are all relatively short, jumping from character to character and, almost without exception, combining various action (and, occasionally, sexual) set pieces with dense expository passages that detail bits and pieces of the mosaic of history, technology and mythology (in particular, the mythology of the indigenous peoples of Latin America) that underlies the story.

While this certainly conveys the which-way-is-up feel of multiple layers of virtual reality, it is at best an imperfect narrative strategy, as too many characters come and go too quickly for the reader to be fully invested in them, leaving a feeling not of complexity so much as clutter. Benito is the only fully developed character in the novel, and it is only with his concluding "report" that there is anything approaching a coherent account of what has actually happened. Some of the subplots, such as a puzzling attempt to link, through Benito's family history, the events of the novel with Nazi Germany, might be better omitted, while others, such as the storyline involving a former teacher named Papa Art, deserve more attention than the author gives them. And the scattered evocations of 20th-century popular culture, such as a conversation between two different avatars of Humphrey Bogart, seem out of tone with the rest of the novel.

Still, it is better for a novel to attempt too much than too little, and Prime Time is, inarguably and admirably, tremendously ambitious. It also earns its publisher's label of "postcyberpunk" as it considers not just the augmentation of the human and the gap between the real and the virtual, but the transition from one level of virtuality to another, and the collision of the human and post-human within that transition. Prime Time is Book One of a projected trilogy, and it will be interesting to see where the author goes from here.