Dr Katherine Beckford have spent ten years using computer power and AIs to create over 200 fictional characters, known as 'erams', from all periods of history, who interact with their questioners as a real person would. Soldiers, parsons, dockers, even a Victorian tart with a heart. For Dr Beckford, it's a wonderful use of artificial intelligence and a superb learning tool. For Sir John, it's a wonderful use of university funds and a superb way to make money ( and gain personal honours).

Something was bound to go wrong.

When a number of erams become self-aware and escape into the world's computer net, it seems that the outbreak can be contained -- but life is never that simple. The university authorities should never have attempted to destroy them.

Eugene Byrne's debut novel has all the panache, wit and invention of the finest Science Fiction, and characters you'll love. Some of them are even human.Perhaps the most sublimely silly Utopian novel for years, ThiGMOO-- acronymically, This Great Movement of Ours--is at the same time attractively cynical about human behaviour and motivation. The Museum of the Mind, a collection of erams, virtual representations of imaginary personalities, was put together as an educational aide-- what could be more calculated to interest not very bright students in the rise of feminism than a conversation with a Victorian whore, or in the English Civil War than being shouted at by a ranter? A wave of religious conversions among the erams is but the first of the many problems to hit Daily Mail columnist museum head Sir John; academic skulduggery, the last left-wing hacker in Britain and the First Church of Satan all have a role to play in what follows. And though the erams may have started off as imaginary creations, they rapidly develop an attractive and three-dimensional life of their own--the love affair between streetwalker Nelly and her gallant cavalryman is genuinely touching. Byrne is fascinated both by the minutiae of radical political sects and by the mechanisms of mundane politics; this is an intelligent and thoughtful political satire as well as a very funny one. --Roz Kaveney