William Morrow is gearing up for the December 27the hardcover release of The Demi-Monde: Winter by Rod Rees, the U.S. edition of a novel that was released in the U.K. to wide critical acclaim.
Description: Demi Monde is the code name for a sophisticated, complex – and unpredictable – computer simulation. The brainchild of the U.S. military, the Demi-Monde supposedly trains soldiers virtually to prepare them for modern urban warfare. A world of eternal civil war, the Demi-Monde is ruled by “Dupes” – cyber-duplicates of some of history’s cruelest tyrants: Reinhard Heydrich, Shaka Zulu, Ivan the Terrible, Maximilien Robespierre, Aleister Crowley. The walls of virtual reality start crumbling when the Demi-Monde, a self-teaching program, begins to empower the über-villains that inhabit the districts. And the lunatics have started taking over the asylum…
Its thirty million digital inhabitants are ruled by duplicates of some of history’s cruellest tyrants: Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust; Beria, Stalin’s arch executioner; Torquemada, the pitiless Inquisitor General; Robespierre, the face of the Reign of Terror. But something has gone badly wrong inside the Demi-Monde, and the US President’s daughter has become trapped in this terrible world. It falls to eighteen-year-old Ella Thomas to rescue her, yet once Ella has entered the Demi-Monde she finds that everything is not as it seems, that its cyber-walls are struggling to contain the evil within and that the Real World is in more danger than anyone realizes.
