On My Way to Paradise — Dave Wolverton

Here is a powerful first novel, at once disturbing and compelling--the chronicle of one man's odyssey of self-discovery within a world at war. ON MY WAY TO PARADISE.
In a world of ever-worsening crisis, Angelo Osic is an anomaly: a man who cares about others. One day he aids a stranger. . . and calls down disaster, for the woman called Tamara is also a woman on the run, the only human with the knowledge that will save Earth from the artificial intelligences plotting to overthrow it.
Fleeing the assassins who seek him as well as Tamara, Angelo seizes the only escape route available: to sign on as a mercenary with the Japanese Motoki Corporation in its genocidal war against the barbarian Yabajin. Jacked into training machines that simulate warfare, Angelo "dies" a hundred times. . .and is resurrected to fight again. In a world of death, he dreams only of life-and the freedom to love once more.


"I hesitate to tell you that this is Dave Wolverton's first novel. The book is so mature in its sensibility and so strong in its artistry, so deep in its invention that most of us who write fiction would be proud to have such a novel as the culmination, not the beginning, of our career. Many fine words that have won Hugos and Nebulas pale beside this book.

"I believe that this novel will be remembered as the first book by the finest science fiction writer of the 1990s. I suspect that we may someday look back on On My Way to Paradise as the first stirring of one of the great American writerse of our time. I know for a fact, however, that people who read science fiction because the want an exhilirating combination of intelligence and adventure will love every page of this book."

Orson Scott Card, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction