Thigmoo is all about AIs and virtual personalities. He calls them ERAMs and they are initially created as virtual characters for a university history departments on-line museum. But things go wrong, they get religion, they become aware and they escape, eventually setting themselves up in their own cyber-enclave in the desert. The plot is reasonable but the post-modern style is horrendous - the book being told through the old professor talking to a "biographer" ERAM and with odd notes to tell you how to "method read" - i.e. get a hangover before reading a chapter with a character with a hangover. Gets totally in the way as far as I'm concerned. To make things "easy" the book also relies to much on the characters living in the same visualisation as they humans, so fights between the ERAMS and UN "cyber-police" are acted out as Roman or Napoleonic skirmishes. Oh well, at least I finished it.
