Tom Clancy's Net Force Explorers - Virtual Vandals

Tom Clancy's Net Force Explorers #1

by Diane Duane

From the #1 New York Times bestselling creators of Op-Center comes a different kind of law enforcement.
In the year 2010, computers are the new superpowers. Those who control them, control the world. To enforce the Net Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency within the Net Force.
When the director of Net Force is assassinated, Deputy Director Alex Michaels is thrust into one of the most powerful and dangerous positions in the world. At the same time, cyber-terrorists sabotage mainframe computers across the country, causing famine, chaos, and death.
Now Michaels and his team must find out who is responsible -- and what they have to gain. But there is another problem. If they assassinated one Net Force director, what will stop them from assassinating another?
A powerful examination of America's defense and intelligence systems of the future, Tom Clancy's Net Force is the creation of Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik, inspiring this novel as well as the explosive ABC Television miniseries.

Genres: Fiction, Thriller, Young Adult, Science Fiction, Adventure, Mystery, Novels

Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Diane Duane has been a writer of science fiction, fantasy, TV and film for more than forty years.

Besides the 1980's creation of the Young Wizards fantasy series for which she's best known, the "Middle Kingdoms" epic fantasy series, and numerous stand-alone fantasy or science fiction novels, her career has included extensive work in the Star Trek TM universe, and many scripts for live-action and animated TV series on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as work in comics and computer games. She has spent a fair amount of time on the New York Times Bestseller List, and has picked up various awards and award nominations here and there.

She lives in County Wicklow, in Ireland, with her husband of more than thirty years, the screenwriter and novelist Peter Morwood.

Her favorite color is blue, her favorite food is a weird kind of Swiss scrambled-potato dish called maluns, she was born in a Year of the Dragon, and her sign is "Runway 24 Left, Hold For Clearance."

(From her official website)

Reviews

[Henri Moreaux · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a bit of an odd book - the cover, spine and title is plastered with "CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND STEVE PIECZENIK" but no where, not on the cover, title, spine or fine print on the title reverse does the book state who the actual author is.

This aside, this book is a straight up 1990s wet dream of futuristic computing (set in 2025), it's all about virtual reality systems (spelt/conveyed through the made up word of veeyar throughout the book, apparently using the abbrevation VR was too passe) and the weird idea of a law enforcement arm called the Net Force who apparently enforce the law in virtual reality/on the internet. Net Force Explorers is the youth group arm of such, made up of school kids, it is one of these kids who is the main protagonist of the story.

Yeah, by today's standards it's entirely absurd, yet even though it's got the cringey spelling of veeyar throughout the book and the entire premise is out there it actually doesn't do too bad a job of entertaining. Like a terrible B movie it manages to be so absurd that it's actually kind of entertaining, it certainly doesn't hurt that it's a very light read and rather quick at a mere 216 pages.

I wouldn't say rush out and buy it, but if you stumble across it there are worse things to pick up and read.

[Cooper Emmons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Net Force takes place in a Universe very far away from our time, it is 2025 the book is a group of high school aged boys who are in a part of the FBI that covers the computer crime section. In this book computer are everything and the world is a big internet, for example in the book Matt Hunter the main character and Andy Moore and David grey are at a baseball games in Baltimore where the book takes place it also takes place in Washington D.C. for most of the book, but the coolest of all of it is because I have been there several times, when the boys are there there friend Leif has a computer inside his skin and sits at a chair in his house and broadcast a hologram of him right next to the boys and can talk to them and watch what is going on, This is very cool to me because I have watched star wars series and in it there are holograms like the same thing in this book so I had it easy to realty to with the several holograms in his seat. In the book the boys travel where there is virtual internet trouble, the boys go to a party they go to and the host of the party name is, Cat Corrigan they find a ring at here party which does not go away in the simulator there has to be some one hacking the system. They ask to see where it came from and they are looking for a person of interest a Virtual vandal, they find his name they call him mr jewels, they find out that his name is Gerald Savage and they bust him, and get done to the end of the problem.

This book could be a lot better if the author made it better so young adults like me do not have a hard time trying to read it and if the author could get to the point it would make the novel a lot better but the plot was very good.

[Amelia]

Hm. Uh. Ungh. Mmmm. Eh.

I feel unqualified to review this book. I did read it, mostly. I think I would have enjoyed it if I fit the audience profile: violence + children + science fiction.... specifically if I were 9 or 10.

I found the story to be remarkably awkwardly written, the characters uninteresting, and the plot very shallow. It picks up a little with fighting scenes, but otherwise the book was pretty much not-my-thing.

The one thing that vaguely interested me was the proposed world: a future where humans have chips in their heads and meet as often virtually as they do in person.

Conclusion: I didn't like this novel much, won't be reading the sequels, and don't feel qualified to review it.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of course I picked this up because Diane Duane, and it was free at my library so why not? I felt that the plot was a bit predicable but not bad for what it is (fanfiction written by a really excellent author). Since I've not read/watched the original material and am only here for the author's name, I'll not go into too much depth about this except that if you want a popcorn novel (light fare, not too much thinking) than you can do much worse, certainly.

I liked Duane's explorations of the virtual world and can't help but laugh when I think of Dairine programming an ancient computer in the first chapters of High Wizardry in a book from 1983 when having a kid programming was considered genius.

The main thing I objected to was the fact that the MC does a whole bunch of illegal stuff in the name of stopping a worse crime and then gets rewarded for it at the end under the guise of 'punishment' with a wink and a nod. We've seen that elsewhere in novels (Harry Potter really did break a lot of rules) but I expect a bit more than that from Diane Duane.

Honestly I kind of wish she'd used the time on this series to write more of Young Wizards or even about the Feline Wizards, but that's just me being selfish. If this gets new younger readers into Duane's books, I'm all for it.
:-)

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/tom-clancys-net-force-explorers-virtual-vandals-by-diane-duane/

A YA novel, the first in a sequence related to the series of Net Force novels (and TV movie) by Tom Clancy, published in 1998 but set in 2025. I think I probably got enough of a flavour from this not to need to try out the rest of the series of 18 books. Our protagonist, Matt Hunter, tracks down a bunch of hackers who are not only disrupting important cultural events like baseball games, but also infiltrating embassies in Washington and stealing information. The virtual world in this version of 2025 is much more hologrammy and immersive than we have actually managed to generate in real life. It’s the least dystopian future of any of the books and films set on Earth in 2025 that I have tried so far.

[Lorenzo · Rating 3 out of 5]

In un futuro dove la realtà virtuale è un fatto di tutti i giorni, durante una partita di baseball degli strani tizi iniziano a sparare proiettili virtuali ferendo il pubblico a casa. Matt, avendo assistito alla scena decide di iniziare ad indagare per trovare i colpevoli.
Il libro presenta molta più azione reale ed è più incentrato sulle azioni del protagonista che sulla squadra dei Net Force Explorers rispetto agli altri libri della serie.
Rimane comunque una simpatica lettura.

[Wolfgarr · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not read this.
But since rating and then writing a review is the only way one has to make a comment about a book on Goodreads. Here we are.
That said.............
I am seriously confused here. How does a Author ..Get away with using Another Authors name "Tom Clancy" in the title of a book ? ... I honestly would like a answer to that question.

ANYONE ?

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is the year 2025 and a group of young people have become members of the Net Force. When a baseball game is shot up Matt a member of the force tries to find out who is behind all this

[Ernest · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read

[William Crosby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy-to-read (middle school level) cybertech action (VR) with a focus on teens. This ends up with bloody action IRL.

The "bad guy" was annoying and explains and gloats too much.

[Erth · Rating 4 out of 5]

now i am hooked. This was such a great, easy and creative book. i was hooked after the first page.

The characters were easy to fall in love with and follow, along with the story. the author made the mental visions so easy and vivid of the surroundings and the characters actions felt so real.

i would highly recommend this author and this book.

[Books That Burn]

Virtual Vandals wasn't for me. A YA thriller set in 2025, using VR as a setting for shenanigans and espionage, with the pov character singlehandedly confronting a gang who has figured out how to punch in virtual space. Fast-paced, awkward 1990's slang. In fairness, I hear the series gets better. It expects the reader to have a certain level of technological knowledge, and then explains the rest, but we've moved on to have stuff that is often much cooler than what it depicts. It didn't work for me, but I don't think it's bad.

This was a bizarre book for me to read. It was published in the late 1990's, and trying to read and review it in 2020 is pretty trippy. It swings wildly between political screeds about politics set over a century after it was published, and action scenes which never feel dangerous because no one we care about ever is hurt. You can disagree with regards to the opening scene, but my counterpoint would be that the injuries there are on a literally nameless and faceless crowd, plus one person whose name we learned three pages ago. As for the word choice, while I don't begrudge the author failing to anticipate which words would no longer by hyphenated a mere two decades after the book's release (e.g. "on-line"), the thing that totally broke immersion in the story was the constant return to 1990's slang while highlighting that it was specifically slang from over a century ago. There are phrases that we use now that are decades or even centuries old. But, when I, in my normal life, use one of these phrases, it's because they've either remained relevant or returned to relevance in the culture around me. I don't recognize "the bees knees" because I've read a book of early 1900's slang, I recognize it because someone used it around me, and I later learned that it arose in a particular era and stuck because it's evocative.

Word choice aside, I found it difficult to get into this one. Maybe it's just not the right genre for me. In case it's the right genre for you, here goes: Virtual Vandals is a teen power fantasy revolving around computers and being a lot smarter than the adults in the next room. It features descriptions of a navigable virtual-reality landscape that would be more interesting to me if I weren't already familiar with Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, but since I wouldn't give that particular book to a preteen, I won't begrudge the imagery here too much. The main character is always the best, in a frustratingly smarmy kind of way, and when he's briefly in danger he's the only one who has any good ideas for how to get out of it. One of the conceits is that the antagonists have figured out how to inflict damage with virtual objects, and even that isn't enough to make me worry for the pov character. I found him boring at best and insufferable at worst. There's very little meaningful characterization of the main female character, and most of it revolves around how she appears as an avatar and finally as herself. It was enough to make me uncomfortable, but the problem was mostly a lack of sufficient meaningful information to go along with physical descriptions.

I didn't like it, but I wouldn't try to argue with anyone who does care for it. It doesn't inspire strong positive or negative feelings generally for me, just confusion and the feeling that I'd rather read something else.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to categorize. Tom Clancy's name on the cover makes it hard for me to classify it as anything other than a techno-thriller, but the futuristic computer technology presented in these pages is the stuff of pure fantasy. I cannot explain why THE LAWNMOWER MAN movies feel like sci-fi, whereas this somehow doesn't, but that's the impression I'm left with regardless. Perhaps it's because these NET FORCE novels honestly attempt to realistically anticipate future technology, even if they spectacularly miss the mark in doing so.
Seriously, if you're someone who picks up Tom Clancy books for their gritty realism, then skip the NET FORCE series in its entirety. And that goes double for NET FORCE EXPLORERS.
But if you enjoy YA and are down with visiting a world where computer keyboards and monitors are obsolete but pay phones aren't, then this series might be right up your alley. And just in case you were wondering about the status of cell phones in the futuristic world of 2025, it turns out they come built-into people's wallets. (Ironically, the author somehow managed to predict one of the very, very few functions a modern cell phone cannot perform: namely, storing and organizing your cash. Great guess, Tom Clancy!)
Of course, the real author of this book is Diane Duane, who I was familiar with as a STAR TREK author but had never actually read. Her writing is perfectly adequate for YA, but the characters never pop to life the way they do in stuff like HARRY POTTER or THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA. Perhaps that's an unfair comparison, but I really wished the people in this story were a lot less bland. Everything about the book is serviceable but uninspired. Were I not already familiar with the NET FORCE novels for adults, I probably would have been less forgiving. Still, I enjoyed Clancy/Duane's take on the future of virtual reality, even though it is total BS.

[Geert Daelemans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read for young science-fiction fans

Matt Hunter, an enthusiastic Net Force Explorer, and his friends are sitting in the stadium of Camden Yards watching a holographic baseball game. There are only a few people who are physically present at Camden Yards, because most spectators have bought a virtual seat and are watching the game from their home, while at the same time being represented as holographic images at the stadium. Suddenly four virtual viewers stand up from their seats and start firing at the audience with machine guns. One of Matt's friends is hit by a holographic bullet and struggles for his life. Matt starts to wonder how it is possible that people can get hurt by virtual bullets. With the help of the Net Force Explorer team he starts his investigations and soon reveals something that is much bigger than what that vandal's prank might seem at first sight.

Virtual Vandals is a decent and well-written science-fiction story that will definitely serve as an enjoyable read for many youngsters. The main theme is virtual reality, but as opposed to another Net Force book titled The Deadliest Game, this time the storyline is not entirely submerged into a virtual world. Typically of a virtual world is that everything can happen and nothing needs to be explainable. The authors have not stepped into this trap and have kept the suspense into the 'real' world, which is in my opinion the better choice. The story contains a few twists that might not all be as convincing, but they keep up the pace so that Virtual Vandals can be called a real page-turner.

[Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

(FYI I tend to only review one book per series, unless I completely change my mind on a series, so want to change my scoring down a lot)

First time read the author's work?: No

Will you be reading more?: Yes

Would you recommend?: Yes

--------------
How I rate Stars: 5* = I loved (must read all I can find by the author)
4* = I really enjoyed (got to read all the series and try other books by the author).
3* = I enjoyed (I will continue to read the series)
or
3* = Good book just not my thing (I realised I don't like the genre or picked up a kids book to review in error.)

All of the above scores means I would recommend them!
-
2* = it was okay (I might give the next book in the series a try, to see if that was better IMHO.)
1* = Disliked

Note: adding these basic 'reviews' after finding out that some people see the stars differently than I do - hoping this clarifies how I feel about the book. :-)

[Robert Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Net Force By Tom Clancy. A family that is led by the virtual internet until a family receives a "cousin" who has a story himself. I really enjoyed this book. The constant suspense leading up to something big really kept me locked in. Some of the characters in the story caught my eye and kept me reading. As the story continued I wanted to know what happened to them. Many of the descriptions of the settings and the characters gave me graphic visual images. This allowed me to analyze the story even better and enjoy it more. I recommend this book to people who like science fiction. those that like to receive a visual image while they read to assist them in there enjoyment of the book.

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the year 2025 there are people called the Net Force which are basically cops on the internet.
In the beginning of the book Matt Hunter and some other Net Force explorers are at a virtual baseball game. The stadium is mostly full of people that are holograms at the game. Then a few of the holographic people take out guns at shoot at the other holograms. Then it is Matt's job to try and track them down.

[Suzanne Hamilton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This adventure story takes place in the near future when technology dominates the world as never before. People have implants in their brains that allow them to inhabit virtual space. It takes a while for things to heat up plot-wise, but once the stage is set there is plenty of action. A quick read and believable enough.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Old Children's Book. Liked it as a kid, but haven't read it in years.

[Seth Courrégé · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good.

[Alfie Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read it since my senior year in high school.

[Marla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Net Force, a computer security agency recruits teens to explore the Internet. They patrol a virtual reality site and remedy a problem.

[Thomas Roth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting start of a series. Hi tech meets spy boy.

[Derick Lawson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great for kids.

[Randy Grossman · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a decent read...I can't say I totally understood the concept of the Net Force and Virtual reality compared with reality. But, it was suspenseful enough and a pretty clean book.

[Joseph Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the plot of the story.