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Craig Lea Gordon

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ARvekt (Instant Reality Book 1) Kindle Edition

by Craig Lea Gordon (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

29 ratings

Book 1 of 1: Instant Reality

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Will the battle for humanity be fought in reality? Or in her mind?

Tannis Ord is a black-ops cyborg assassin. A highly-trained human-weapon, dedicated to hunting down the last of the brain hacking syndicates. There’s just one problem…

Her mind was broken from a psychotic episode. Neural programming erased her trauma, gave her a fresh start. But when an old brain hacker cult resurfaces, and a sentient AI is set to govern the entire human population, she starts seeing things. Horrors that can’t possibly be real… that make no sense… that only she can see. Ix, their AI Guardian, is abducting innocent citizens from the streets in broad daylight. And it’s using the Augmented Reality it has thrown over the world as cover. Is the AI hellbent on humanities destruction? Or is her mind tearing itself apart again?

ARvekt is an explosive story, fusing action and intrigue into a journey full of twists and turns where you won’t know what’s real and what isn’t. If you enjoy books with amazing plots and characters, set in a stunning futuristic world, then input ARvekt into your brain now.

ARvekt is book one of the Instant Reality Series.

Praise for ARvekt

“WOW. This was the most intense and mind-bending story I've read in a long time. I'm still in the process of getting my brain back online; I think it got a little fried while reading. If you enjoy immersion in action-packed cyberpunk future shock, this book is a must read!”

“This, my friends, is Augmented Reality (AR) taken to its full expression, and it is delightful. It's also complex, requires you to pay attention, and remember what you read before in order to stitch together what's happening. Lovely. I'm pretty stingy with 5-star reviews. This book deserves five stars.”

“I can see hints of The Matrix here, but there is sooo much more! This is jam packed with action and intrigue.”

“We are thrust into the action from page one and the action keeps coming again and again till the end. If you enjoy stories where you don’t know what’s true or not, who can you trust and what to believe, ARvekt is a perfect book. The author really messes with you, making you doubt everything and everyone.”

“This book dives right in to a high tech future and doesn't really take a break. Reminiscent of Black Mirror, you explore a world full of constant connection and stimulus where a series of ritualistic brain hacking murders are just the tip of the iceberg. Action packed all the way through.”

“Gordon is particularly adept at action scenes. The action here is militaristic in parts, gloriously choreographed overall, and vividly depicted.”

“I'm glad to see a new appreciation for what I think is a very clever style of storytelling. Here, Gordon is heavy on the military/chase-scene side, describing a complex mythos whose most interesting feature is a layer of augmented reality that's been slapped on the surface of every real thing in the physical world.”

“Don't trust what you see! Yes - cyber tech, cyber war and virtual world: check, check, check! Interesting characters: check. Interesting plot line: check!”

From the Publisher

Semi-Finalist of the SPSFC 2021

Judges say: “ARvekt starts off with a literal bang, a cyberfest of guns and gore. Its grim, bloody look into technology and how it blends with trauma and our concept of reality fascinated me. The worldbuilding is thought-provoking and completely immerses you in a sensorial kaleidoscope. It asks intriguing questions in a world dualized by technology, as it imagines what boundaries it could possibly breach.”

SPSFC Badge for Winner of the Cover Competition

Winner of the SPSFC 2021 Cover Competition

From 300 covers, our Judges narrowed it down to 100, before opening up voting to the public, who over the course of three weeks cast nearly 1,000 votes to choose their favourite. So, without further ado, the 2021 SPSFC 'Best Cover' is ARvekt

ARkvekt is a fantastic novel that is square within the hole of what I consider to be “true cyberpunk.”

ARvekt by Craig Lea Gordon is a kinetic action-filled cyberpunk thriller that I absolutely love.

It is a bit more Ghost in the Shell than William Gibson but I don’t consider that a bad thing. Cyberpunk can be a bunch of crazy borged-out ninjas fighting government conspiracies just as much as it can be dark and skeevy alleyways where people have more implants than food.

ARvekt is a book filled with twists, turns, fake-outs, and illusions. Many times I thought I had a handle on where the book was going, only for it to surprise me by revealing it was going someplace entirely different. I occasionally got lost in the technology and jargon but that helped make the book feel like it was taking place in a wholly different world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Mind. Blown.

I LOVED the main character, Tannis. She's a total badass agent to whom fighting seems to come as naturally as breathing. But something's a little off in her head. Not too long ago, she had a psychotic episode and killed her partner, after which her brain was reprogrammed. Now, she's supposed to be fine, but as Tannis starts seeing things that other people can't see, we're all wondering if she's going insane (again) or if there's something wrong with the reality as we see it. I enjoyed this premise immensely. A cool heroine who's gone psycho in the past? Yes please, tell me more!

The reality in ARvekt is a whole other can of worms. Every human being is connected to augmented reality through brain implants. On first glance the AR seems to simply provide nice effects such as whales swimming in the air, but it's also being used to cover up a whole lot of creepy stuff with the fate of the entire human race at stake. I found myself wondering alongside Tannis what was real and what wasn't. I loved feeling overwhelmed and disoriented by the visuals as I read: it was like a roller coaster ride on acid.

And did I mention there's a ton of breathtaking action?

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B089QXCY9D
Publisher ‏ : ‎ SID Origin
Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 12, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1.5 MB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 324 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1838054304
Page Flip ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Book 1 of 1 ‏ : ‎ Instant Reality

Best Sellers Rank: #1,444,301 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,467 in Technothrillers (Kindle Store)
- #2,895 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #3,097 in Hard Science Fiction (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
29 ratings

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Craig Lea Gordon

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Craig Lea Gordon fell in love with Science Fiction at a very early age. His earliest memory is of bawling his eyes out on a Saturday morning when a shabby looking robot called Metal Mickey appeared on TV. It wasn't anything to do with the low budget production values, but instead because it had displaced Battle of the Planets, his favourite sci-fi program.

Shortly after he insisted that his parents christen their Ferguson Videostar by recording Battlestar Galactica. From the age of six, a good Christmas was defined by whether or not Star Wars was on TV. At 12 he made his Mum rent him a copy of Robocop, and he has never been the same since. Some say he has a hidden prime directive to create visions of a possible future.

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Clinton Sites
Don't trust what you see!
Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2020
Verified Purchase

Yes - cyber tech, cyber war and virtual world: check, check, check!
Interesting characters: check.
Interesting plot line: check!

The novel starts out by charting one path through the world (is it real?) through permutations that have you reeling as to where the novel is going or how it's getting there.
It starts out strong and ends up stronger!

By way of disclosure - I received a copy by way of a book giveaway.

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Gerald Barber
Instant Reality (Book 1)
Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2023
Verified Purchase
It was an interesting story with an ending I couldn’t have predicted and made the reading worthwhile. Unexpected to say the least. I’ll be looking forward to seeing the next installment.
I had to finish this book, not to say I couldn’t put it down because I did have to take breaks from the author’s archaic prose. The use of whilst for while and span for spun became tedious. I’m not sure what the author was trying to accomplish there. Aside from one dimensional characters, some missed opportunities to build tension with fight scene/action sequences and some parts where the logic failed to draw me in.

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William C. Tracy
A great meditation on what is reality!
Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2022
Read for SPSFC Semifinalists!

Overall Thoughts
This book contains some really great discussion on what the nature of reality is, and how we can trust what we see, especially as we start to depend on augmented reality, and even AI-driven reality. The first half of the story does a really good job addressing these issues, but I felt the second half wound down a little too much into shooting and destruction, making it similar to a lot of other “AI is taking over” sort of stories. But let’s look at how it gets there:

Plot
From the beginning, it’s apparent there are shenanigans going on with Ix, the “benevolent” AI “guiding” humanity toward a better state. We’re introduced to instances, where people can play out scenarios and see how they affect real life. Programmable matter can be made into weapons and tools, and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether a person is in a virtual reality or actual reality. This turns out to be a detriment later on, as I occasionally had issues with visualizing the scenes because I wasn’t sure if it was “real” or not. There’s an element of brain hacking that comes in later as well, and I think some of it was literally drilling into people’s head, but I was never completely sure that it wasn’t a simulation. There’s a great twist later on in the book, however, that does make a little sense of what’s going on, but by that time I was pretty confused with what had actually happened and what was simulated or even an artificial hallucination.

Setting
I’ve covered a few parts of this already, because just by this story’s nature, it’s very setting-oriented. Artificial reality is a big part of it, and I think this is really what the story showed off best. Especially in the beginning, passing through the different layers of reality was really exciting, and it gave a lot of depth to the mystery of what was truly happening. When people can literally be edited out of reality, or what your eyes show you must be questioned, even to the extent of your own body or who is in the room with you, questions begin to pile up. This broke down a little toward the end, as some of the descriptions became a little too poetic for me to make sense of.

Character
The main character Tannis, is definitely not a reliable narrator, and not through her own fault. Part of the fun of this story is seeing how many times the rug gets pulled out from under Tannis and she has to adjust to a new reality. We know she’s gone through neural reprogramming, and the constant refrain is that she is regressing back to a psychotic break. It gives her character a lot of challenges to get over. There are some other POVs as well, though those characters are relatively minor, to the point where I kept confusing a few of them. I’d have liked maybe one or two fewer POVs in order to develop the rest of the characters more fully, so that we have more of an emotional stake in their eventual fate. Overall a very fun and thoughtful book, especially at the beginning, though some of the imagery became hard to follow toward the end.

Score out of 10 (My personal score, not the final contest score)
This poses some great questions about simulation and the nature of reality, but gets bogged down at the end by unclear description and a lot of Run and Gun. 7.25/10.

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Jay B
Augmented Reality + AI = Great Stuff
Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2020
Given a glance at my reviews on Goodreads or Amazon, you'll see I'm pretty stingy with 5-star reviews.

This book deserves five stars. It's not for the faint-of-scifi-reader, though.

Augmented Reality in general is the use of technology to provide visual, audible, or other sensory input that goes beyond what we have built-in to us. Visual overlays describing what is in view, audible inputs that supplement what we're hearing.

Mainstream sci-fi authors have their characters wear glasses, hearing buds, etc. In ARvekt, though, these enhancements are deeply embedded into the person. Nano-wires feeding through a human brain & central nervous system plus wireless connectivity to the outside means no glasses required for seeing and manipulating screens that simply pop into vision on-command, or for deploying automated analyses leading to automatic physical responses. This, my friends, is Augemented Reality (AR) taken to its full expression, and it is delightful. It's also complex, requires you to pay attention, and remember what you read before in order to stitch together what's happening. Lovely.

This isn't a spoiler; chapter one page one drops you fully into this world. In fact, in good sci-fi fashion, all this AR world isn't explained; you're asked to just become part of it, and learn as the story develops. In some books this works out badly; there's not enough provided to let you build & flesh out the world you're asked to inhabit. Here, though the rate of context building you have to do is high, it's possible to get right into the world & keep up. Again, lovely.

Plus, we get amazingly imaginative writing. Here's an example of a view a character sees within this Augmented Reality:
Instead of hitting the water and submerging, the whale exploded, its body breaking down into thousands of flapping wings. The vague form of the whale still visible as a flock of blue doves skimmed the surface of the river their wing tips leaving glowing contrails in the air. The doves merged to form a pod of gleaming dolphins, which span, jumped and played together in the air before diving back down into the water.
What an amazing image the author dreamed up and described for us. Lovely.

Then, add to this a fully intelligent AI character, introduced on page 2, that is able to interact with the main characters. This AI character, too, is quickly, and ably developed, and becomes simply another member of the cast that you fully accept. Again, excellent.

Add in a good story, and a few excellent comments about what it means to exist in a world with this level of augmentation and interaction with technology. I won't provide a quote here to avoid spoilers, but the observations about a world like this are awesome.

All of this is stuff you have to synthesize as you read. As you reach the end, you realize you've mostly got it all together, but it was all so good & enjoyable that you want to go read the book again with the foreknowledge of how it actually all stitches together, and enjoy the ride ... better.

This fits my definition of a five-star book. I'm super-happy to have read it, and hope there is more from this author, and this world, coming in the future.

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Sean Wildman
Overall good book
Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2020
The concept of the book is solid. The flow of prose was very fluid and easy to read and quite enjoyable. I found that the violence was thrown in just for violence's sake and not to add to the story line so that was a bit off putting for me. Overall it was a solid book though.

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Alex James
ARvekt was a treasured experience
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 11, 2021
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The main character, Tannis
From the first book in this series to this book, as soon as we’re introduced to new character Tannis, I wasn’t as interested since I felt she hadn’t been introduced properly, but it later became clear she was an action-first–personality-later type of character with a troubled past – and mental state – and that later made sense to me. The prose is a lot to take in – you feel like you’re plugged in – but it’s clear Tannis is a futuristic cop rooting out a group of criminal hackers who hack people’s brains, of all things. She works for some secret department and takes orders from an AI called Ix, a colour shifting entity whose voice changes gender but we remember her best as female.

There is more than meets the eye, as you could have guessed. Is reality real? Is Tannis psychotic or is she being fed lies? Is there really a conspiracy or is it in her head? Why does she keep blacking out? Why does she sense that what she’s seeing just doesn’t make sense? I liked these questions posed as they gave the story more depth, but what really gave it depth were the descriptions, making you feel you’re in a 3D world not dissimilar from the movie Alita or the series Ghost in the Shell.

‘Like a bright roll of silk thrown in the distance. Giant lily pads floated on its surface … thousands of them constantly ascending into the night sky.’

‘The last vestiges of the weapon platform jutting out of the top of the Thames, its rusting form a stark reminder of how close they came to losing that day.’

Ix, the AI
So, there is this AI called Ix that appears benevolent and all knowing at first, perhaps like that model of Alexa you have at home! Not too many chapters in we learn she’s demanding more powers. As soon as the reader knows of this, we suspect we’re up for a power grabbing experience or a conspiracy on a huge scale and the author makes no secret of this. Keep reading, I implore you! It was easy for me to assume how it was going to end …

Criticism
Sometimes I lost sight of where the character was in relation to other objects or situations. Sometimes all the action happened too quickly.

Overall
ARvekt wasn’t too convoluted or derivative as some works in this genre are. You read it having felt like it was unique in its own right, and it does twist the genre in different ways. It felt like a complex multi-coloured video game and to say the story had colour is no understatement: the scenes were vivid and I remember many of them now, a month after reading. ARvekt was a treasured experience and I recommend readers give it that go, which you won’t regret (unless you’re miserable?).

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Ben Roberts
Amazing cyberpunk!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 6, 2022
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Action-heavy cyberpunk with a healthy dash of reality-warping PKD sauce. Comparisons to the Matrix are understandable given the machine-gun-cartwheel and bullet-time references in the opening scene, but I think it's more the case that ARvekt and the Matrix share common ancestors - specifically Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell. Gordon delivers on his cyberpunk promises - lots of glowy things, lots of detailed military tech, lots of brain crashes. And all the action is centred around a twisty political conspiracy that provides plenty of mystery to drive the story forward. If you enjoyed playing Deus Ex or Cyberpunk 2077 and you fancy getting punched in the mouth by their roided-out cousin, this is a fantastic place to start.

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JMac
An amazing and mind blowing story
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 20, 2020
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Wow! Right from the moment you open onto the first page, one is overcome with a mindbending kaleidoscope of amazing images. I was totally absorbed into a dystopian future world where the computer rules. What is the true reality in amongst a tsunami of strange and deceptive images. Tannis is a warrior fighting to stop the enemy from destroying the world around her. But who is the real enemy? I loved this book. It is truly a brilliant work and so different from the average science fiction novel. Just as one thinks that they have worked out the plot there is a surprising twist to the story. Then right at the end of the book, one is brought to another twist that utterly amazed me. This is science fiction at it's best and I can't wait to read another of Gordon's creations.

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PA Reay
Captivating Sci Fi thriller
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 13, 2020
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The world of augmented and virtual reality is dystopian and shockingly plausible, but rarely feels grim. A real page turner, fast paced and exciting, with a great mix of Sci Fi thriller and action. Surprising to the very end. I very much look forward to reading more from this series, and I'm not particularly a Sci Fi or cyberpunk reader.

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ARvekt (Instant Reality Book 1) Kindle Edition

From the Publisher

Semi-Finalist of the SPSFC 2021

Winner of the SPSFC 2021 Cover Competition

ARkvekt is a fantastic novel that is square within the hole of what I consider to be “true cyberpunk.”

Editorial Reviews

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Craig Lea Gordon

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Top reviews from the United States

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5.0 out of 5 stars Don't trust what you see!

4.0 out of 5 stars Instant Reality (Book 1)

5.0 out of 5 stars A great meditation on what is reality!

5.0 out of 5 stars Augmented Reality + AI = Great Stuff

3.0 out of 5 stars Overall good book

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars ARvekt was a treasured experience

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing cyberpunk!

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing and mind blowing story

5.0 out of 5 stars Captivating Sci Fi thriller

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Don't trust what you see!

Instant Reality (Book 1)

A great meditation on what is reality!

Augmented Reality + AI = Great Stuff

Overall good book

ARvekt was a treasured experience

Amazing cyberpunk!

An amazing and mind blowing story

Captivating Sci Fi thriller