''Gridiron'' is a
science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...
novel written by British
author
An author is the writer of a book, article, play, mostly written work. A broader definition of the word "author" states:
"''An author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility f ...
Philip Kerr
Philip Ballantyne Kerr (22 February 1956 – 23 March 2018) was a British author, best known for his Bernie Gunther series of historical detective thrillers.
Early life
Kerr was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, where his father was an enginee ...
. It is a story about a highly technical building (nicknamed The Gridiron), which becomes self-aware and tries to kill everyone inside, confusing real life with a video game.
Plot summary
Ray Richardson and his top team of architects have developed a super-smart building for Yue-Kong Yu's business, the Yu Corporation. It is very much self-standing. It can clean itself, uses
hologram
Holography is a technique that enables a wavefront to be recorded and later re-constructed. Holography is best known as a method of generating real three-dimensional images, but it also has a wide range of other applications. In principle, i ...
s as greeters in the reception, controls the lifts, toilets, and offices, and digitizes everyone's voice on entry, to allow them to use voice activated services in the building such as lifts and doors. The whole system was given the name Abraham.
Another key feature of Abraham was its ability to replicate itself, to adapt to modern office needs and objectives. This, however becomes a problem, when, before office work even starts in the Gridiron, Abraham start creating a new program named Isaac. This is deleted by computer programmers Yojo and Beech, with Beech actually reluctant to do so.
Shortly after this, however, members of the Gridiron team begin to be suspiciously killed. These seem to be the fault of the protesters against the building who are outside, and Cheng Peng Fei is arrested on suspicion of one of the murders.
Then, a routine inspection of the Gridiron involving Ray Richarson and his entire team (including Jenny Bao), ends in the whole group being locked in, and two policemen from
LAPD Homicide coming to inspect the murder of Sam Glieg. After several more deaths from the team, Bob Beech discovers that during the self-replication that Abraham started, another program was created in the process, namely, Ishmael. This program escaped the deletion process by integrating itself with a
video game
Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...
which was on the Gridiron's system. Ishmael now believes that he is in a game, and the objective is to kill all human players before one escapes, or before time runs out.
The majority of the team are killed, leaving Mitch, Jenny, Helen, and Frank to escape the Gridiron moments before it destroys itself (time has run out). Ishmael, however, had e-mailed himself to an unknown location, thus saving himself from the destruction of the building.
Awards
The author received the
Bad Sex in Fiction Award
''Literary Review'' is a British literary magazine founded in 1979 by Anne Smith, then head of the Department of English at the University of Edinburgh. Its offices are on Lexington Street in Soho. The magazine was edited for fourteen years by ...
1995 for this book.
And the
Deutscher Krimi Preis The Deutscher Krimi Preis, or the ''German Crime Fiction Award'', is the oldest and most prestigious German literary prize for crime fiction.
It has been awarded since 1985 by the Bochum Crime Archive. Unlike the Friedrich Glauser Prize, which is ...
.
1995 British novels
1995 science fiction novels
Techno-thriller novels
Novels about architects
Chatto & Windus books
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