Being Geek Chic is a blog about one woman navigating the male-dominated industries of production and tech. It's written by Elizabeth Giorgi, Founder, CEO and Director of Mighteor - one of the world's first internet video production companies. Learn more about Mighteor here.
If you’re reading this blog, it should be no surprise that we love a great female protagonist. So when my friend Jeff reached out to tell me about his new book, Spirit in Realtime, which features a badass girl named Max who lives in a world where virtual reality and reality have merged.
“In 2020 San Diego, Max and her friends live in a wired world where information is a commodity, everyone has a price, and safety is an illusion sold to rubes and noobs. But cyberspace is also an equalizer, allowing Max and her tribe to transcend society’s limits and become who they want to be.Until now, Max’s biggest hassle was being a 15-year-old girl gamer in a world where that made you a target for misogynistic trolls – or worse. But when Max’s dad, a computer science professor at UCSD, doesn’t come home from work one day, Max finds herself plunged into a world of hackers, international corporate spies and the secretive government agency known as Cyber Command.”
Here’s the first part of the excerpt:
To get to The Buzz Max had to log into Cyberspace. Cyberspace wasn’t a place exactly. It was more like a collection of places that existed within a sprawling electronic communication network. Once upon a time, when it was smaller, the network was called the Internet. Or the World Wide Web. Now it was the Ubiquitous Web, or the UW. These days kids like Max called it the Yoob.
The Ubiquitous Web was everywhere. On your phone. In your car. In your glassy-glass. On the wired, sensor studded shirts the trendy kids in Tokyo were wearing. The UW was the sum total of all of the computers, screens, phones, TVs, appliances, vehicles and more that were all hooked up by hard lines, soft lines, cable feeds, wireless and satellites so that they could talk to each other.
Computers had talked to each other over phone lines since the 1950s. But before Max was born, people communicated on the Internet by typing words into a computer. There were underlined words called links that connected to other places on the Internet when they were clicked on. Following the links from one to another was where the phrase “Surfing the Web” came from.
As time went on, links became doorways, windows, elevators, escalators, telephone booths, floating whirlpools, the mouths of man-eating dragons and thousands of even more fantastic variations. Everywhere was linked to somewhere or it was nowhere.
Download all of Chapter 3 here. You can buy the book from all the normal online retailers, or you can start here. And thank you to Jeff for sharing!
