"Commander Cool brings a ring of obvious authenticity to scenes that others can only describe from the outside. He's been there!" -- David Drake

Tom Cool, whose writing career was launched in paperback with Infectress (Baen MM, 1997), breaks into hardcover with Secret Realms. In the first half of the next century, a band of warriors is raised from infancy in a virtual-reality environment of endless battle. They all become superb soldiers. But as war breaks out in the real world between Japan and China, their virtual scenarios become maps of reality, and their strategies acted out by real battle units. But Cat, Trickster, Dreamer, Snake, and the others don't know it. All they have ever known is the endless settings of the virtual world. Then one day they discover the real world, their bodies held prisoner in a secret military facility on an island in the Pacific. They decide to reclaim themselves and enter the real world -- and the real war. Secret Realms, like the work of Roger Zelazny, is SF adventure with a superhero twist.

"A seminal standard that will measure the future tales of life-inside-the-mainframe". -- Charles Harness