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If I had received the manuscript for Cyberscam 2000 for critique in a writing workshop, or from a friend, it would go back to its author with a lot of annotations. I think the first thing I'd say would be, "be sure to read material which is as similar to what you want to write as possible." In this case it might be Tom Clancy, but it's frankly hard to tell. It seems likely to me that Gary Sutton has had little or no previous experience writing fiction. Not only is his prose style generally flat and without panache, the plot of this e-book is not carefully thought out.

Sutton is the author of "two previous books, including best-selling Profit Secrets from a No- Nonsense CEO." That passage appears on the disk jacket (I guess e-books have disk jackets as opposed to dust jackets). As soon as I read it, warning lights started blinking in my head. For good reason, I was soon to learn.

Cyberscam 2000 purports to be a techno-thriller about an attempt by a band of international criminals to crash the Internet and simultaneously take control of a new form of global transportation. All, you understand, with the goal of ruling the world. I don't really understand what they expect to gain by crashing the Internet, but that may be because I found my attention wandering while I was reading this thing. Cyberscam 2000 reads exactly like software documentation, which would be fine (well, not really) if it were a tome on IIS4 or NT servers, but is otherwise what we webmasters call "A Bad Thing" when it pertains to fiction.

Engineers Kelly and Suki (do they have first names? Or are these their first names? Sutton never bothers to tell us) have devised a new method of transportation. Although no one ever says so, it's a chordal transport, whereby underground modules are slung along a chord of the planet's radius. No investors will give them the time of day until the ill-spoken Mr Boris (no first name, again, or maybe no last name -- I'm not clear on that), head of an international crime syndicate coughs up the bucks. Of course, all he wants is to rule the world, and he sees this transportation system as a means to that end. That, and taking control of the Internet.

But don't ask me why or how! I swear, I read through this whole book (really a novella) without getting a shred of insight into any of these characters or what the hell they were up to. Here's the gist of Boris's plan, taken verbatim from the book:

"'How many Internet servers under our lease this moment?'
He listened and clenched both fists.
'Not enough, this moving, that reach 1% of capacity by 2000 to execute control.'"

A.L. Sirois walks the walk, too. He's a longtime member of SFWA and currently serves the organization as webmaster for the SFWA BULLETIN. His personal site is at http://www.w3pg.com/jazzpolice.