Product Description

From a bold new talent comes a smart, stylish near-future thriller that fuses the fierce imagination of The Matrix with the chilling social vision of Minority Report.

Set in the day after tomorrow, Idlewild opens as a young man awakes with amnesia: He cannot remember who he is and doesn't recognize anything around him-all he knows for sure is that someone is trying to kill him. Not certain whom he can trust, he becomes reacquainted with eight companions, all of whom are being trained at a strange school run by an enigmatic figure named Maestro. Working to uncover the identity of the person who has attempted to murder him, the young man quickly starts to unravel a series of truths, making it clear that much more than just his life is at stake.

Taking the best of the genre and transcending it, Sagan's cool debut will appeal to fans of Neil Gaiman and Orson Scott Card, while also drawing in readers of novels such as House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski and Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2002054 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Billed as a near-future thriller, Sagan's first novel plods through terrain all too familiar to SF readers. The narrator awakens with amnesia in a mysterious realm easily identified as a computer-generated virtual reality, fraught with metaphors and symbols. He slowly grasps that his name is Halloween, and that he may have murdered someone called Lazarus. Eventually, he realizes he's one of a handful of high school students attending "Immersive Virtual Reality" classes at the Idlewild IVR Academy, sponsored by the Gedaechtnis Corporation, a multinational biotech company. Intimidated by the villainous teacher, Maestro, and wary of his fellow students, Halloween is determined to recover his memory, apparently damaged in a power surge that threatened to destroy the IVR, and learn what really happened to the missing Lazarus. Despite a compelling twist near the middle, the low tension and meandering plot will likely frustrate the primary target audience, mainstream fans of such futuristic action films as The Matrix and Minority Report. Sagan may not be the next Philip K. Dick or William Gibson, but he shows enough talent here to suggest he can improve on pacing in the promised sequel.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
A teen named Halloween awakes from a nightmare convinced someone's out to kill him. Or was it only a virtual nightmare? For that matter, is HE real? In this dystopian future nothing is certain except that our hero is in mortal danger. He must save not only himself, but the entire human race. The lad himself tells the tale in this rousing sci-fi thriller, which is interrupted occasionally by virtual warnings from a cyborg voice (impersonated by Beth McDonald and aided by clever editing). As Halloween, Clayton Barclay Jones sounds appropriately young. Unfortunately, he also sounds inexperienced. After an energetic opening, he soon disengages from his text, which he merely recites with less technique than the material demands. Y.R. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
The tension is palpable from the first page as a young man recovering from a powerful electrical shock realizes that all he knows is that he's about 18 and a student of some kind--and that Lazarus is dead. Halloween, as he is known, becomes certain that someone wants him dead, too. He is one of 10 students attending an exclusive Immersive Virtual Reality boarding school while their bodies lie in a hospital attached to IVs and virtual-reality equipment. Add to the mix a hard-nosed virtual schoolmaster, virtual nannies, and sophisticated computer hacking as the teens try to manipulate the system. In his first novel, the son of Carl Sagan captures perfectly the voice and actions of a rebellious, extremely intelligent teenager. Though its appeal is much wider, recommend this mesmerizing, multilayered futuristic tale to fans of Card's Ender novels. Sally Estes
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Interesting ending buoys this apocalyptic science fiction
Apocalyptic science fiction is hit and miss. I was a little skeptical coming in to this one, but it seemed like an interesting concept. Sagan's Idlewild falls right in the middle, neither hitting nor missing.

The beginning was alright, not really going anywhere. In fact the beginning was rather boring, not going anywhere. We are introduced to 10 different characters who, go figure, are teenagers. Half like each other, the other half don't. And it didn't really go anywhere.

Eventually Idlewild started picking up as the IVR scenes began getting interesting as the mysteries started fleshing out a somewhat coherent plot. And just as it did you stop and think, "Matrix?", which doesn't do anything to making the reader enjoy the read more.

But just as that was the turning point to wondering if you wanted to continue reading, it also finally made the book interesting as the initial similarities are only just that, and the book becomes its own beast and takes on a life of its own.

Halloween is the main character, and he seems the most interesting as well. Unfortunately, the character development was stagnant in the first half and didn't have enough time to catch up with the newer and better storyline that developed at the end. Thus the reason it was hit and miss. In the beginning it was okay, the middle got a little better before getting worse, and then the last third eventually picked up and became interesting.

Sagan's book would have been entirely more interesting if he had focused more on the post apocalyptic world than on the IVR world. I was interested enough to continue reading, and I was captivated when I read the excerpt chapter at the end of the book and would certainly read his next to see what happens.

3.5 stars.

The Matrix meets The End of the World
This book had been sitting on my shelf for a while and being the bored college student that I was this summer, I finally picked it up and actually read it.

Idlewild has a great plot. It's set in a post-apocalyptic world where a disease known as Black Ep has ravaged the Earth, killing nearly everyone on Earth save 10 genetically engineered kids that were designed by the last scientists to one day revive humanity and cure Black Ep. It's a fascinating plot that reminded me much of the Matrix where you have 10 kids plugged into a virtual reality environment loaded up with all the "programs" designed to further them along into maturation so that one day when they come of age, they will be armed with all of the knowledge to come into the real world and save it.

My only real qualm with the book is a lack of character development. There's too much time spent on the cool idea of a Matrix type environment and not enough time actually telling the reader who everyone really is. This coupled with the book's ending which falls flat on its face and doesn't resolve anything.

However, even with that being said, I'd still rate the book about a B just because the concepts were so good and the plot so well-defined. I recently just finished the second book in the series, Edenborn, and it does indeed resolve the character development issues and ending issues that Idlewild had.

If you're looking for another sci-fi book to add to the reading list, make sure you grab this one first.

Clever, if haphazard, debut novel revisits familiar ideas
Nick Sagan's first novel, "Idlewild," reminds me of George R.R. Martin's admonishment to new writers - write several short stories before writing your first novel. Just like you have to train by running short distances before you hit your first marathon, young writers always underestimate the difficulties of sustaining a novel over a couple hundred pages.

For all I know, Nick Sagan has written several excellent short stories. What I do know is that "Idlewild" is far from a polished gem. First, it relies on a standard cliche - the first-person narrator awakes with amnesia, but quickly ascertains that someone is trying to kill him. How many times have we seen this chestnut? Our hero, Halloween, then seems to occupy a Matrix-type world - indeed, one wonders if Sagan has to pay the Matrix producers royalties for plot infringement, including down to the dastardly traitor in the mix. Finally, we veer into Planet of the Apes territory as a spaceship lands to find a post-apocalyptic Earth.

Despite some fun with the virtual-reality idea as well as some mild mocking of the upper-middle class American dream (one conceit is that the ten kids chosen to participate in this virtual-reality experience is so they can get scholarships to Harvard Medical School), gaping plot holes emerge. Motives for key players are lost or inadequately glossed over. Characters navigate post-apocalyptic Earth with virtually no difficulties. Key emotional scenes occur off-stage. All in all, "Idlewild" looks like it was trying too hard to get in under 300 pages - the problem is that it chose the wrong pages to insert.

Sagan is a talented writer, and shows promise. I liked a couple of the elements of the book, and Sagan handles certain twists deftly. Several passages and ideas in "Idlewild" are interesting, but ultimately "Idlewild" is too jumpy and cliched to qualify as a stellar first novel. A sequel is planned.