At some point in the future the AIs not only got the upper hand against humanity but exploited it - everyone alive lives because they are let to and when the AI gets bored, it just dissolves them and makes them a part of whatever the AI is doing next - the ultimate wrong place, wrong time case. As everything is mixed up, folklore, literature and reality had collapsed into each other, reshuffled and spit out as history - with the AI's ability to create any person anytime anywhere.

In the middle of this madness, 6 young people receive a golden ticket (and if you miss that reference, Irvine will spell it out at one point). And while we follow the 6 of them first getting the tickets and then embarking on a journey to get to where the tickets lead, we see the America of the times - from the 6 places they each started from to the rest of the country (mostly in passing but not only).

The text is full of literary and historical references - some are spelled out, some are just hinted at. You can spend the novel just trying to recognize all of them (Irvine seems to have dropped most of the current cultural references he wanted to use into a mixer and started the thing on high). Even some real people show up (Mark Twain shows up twice even).

At the end the novel ends up being more about the world than the people or the quest - if one expects a resolution for our 6 lucky winners, they may be disappointed. It is not that kind of novel. It is really a novel about taking a risk by doing something new, about the path taken when you don't think any choices and about consciousness - because after all it is a tale about an AI trying to grasp with humanity - and not by just killing us all. ( )

An interesting read which was both very light and thought provoking. My biggest complain was that I thought it ended abruptly, which was by design--that was part of the thought provoking part. it does leave a huge opening for a follow on book to see how the characters responded to the situation in which they were placed. ( )