Here are excerpts from a few reviews. There are tons of other reviews of this book on the net, including, at last count, 95 reader reviews on Amazon.
On Salon, , Andrew Leonard wrote that Acts is
“…a book infused with a sensibility that you don’t normally expect a ‘hard science fiction’ novel to have: real emotions, real heartbreak and a real sense of the craziness at the core of the human condition.”
Web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman wrote:
Almost everyone I know who is serious about the internet and has spent more than a few years working on web stuff has read John R. Sundman’s novel, Acts of the Apostles, your everyday story of bioengineering, Gulf War Syndrome, Trojan Horses, and millennium cultists. (If you haven’t yet read this classic underground thriller cum paranoid fantasy, do yourself a favor; it’s pretty great.)
A satisfying suspense thriller that is disturbingly thought-provoking. Like [Douglas] Coupland’s work, it is deeply saturated in the geek world view, and full of enjoyable cultural and pop-cultural allusions. Unlike Coupland’s work, it is plot-driven.
Jeff “Hemos” Bates of Slashdot wrote
the thriller develops ranging the world, encompassing favorites like nanotechnology gone bad, mind control, multinational corporate intrigue, computer chip design, seances, and running from the law.
The book is purportedly about Gulf War Syndrome and its causes, but that’s only the starting point: The plot itself is believable, for a thriller. I’ve described it to friends as “What Tom Clancy would write if he were smart.” The plot devices, the characters and topics are all very familiar to the geek audience, and it’s quite refreshing to read a book that understands the mindset its audience will have.
On the open biology site
Bioinformatics.org, molecular biologist Pete St. Onge wrote
Sundman obviously “gets it,” and more importantly, he gets it right. The result is an intelligent, credible story of action and intrigue reminiscent of Mamet’s Spanish Prisoner.
In the Midwest Book Review, John Jurek wrote
Acts of the Apostles is the fin de siecle techno-thriller novel. It is an incredible read. In it a nightmare of nanotechnology and genetic manipulation of uncomfortable believability unfolds before us, the equal if not better of any work by any seasoned big name writer in this genre. As a first novel, its craftsmanship is quite beyond accounting. Author John F. X. Sundman has written a magnificent work of literature, and has simultaneously made a bold ethical statement about the inexorable but blind quest of science, the technological hubris that feeds off of it, and freedom of the individual mind that is threatened by it.
On Mostlyfiction.com they had this to say:
[Sundman’s] skills can be compared to early Tom Clancy. In Hunt for Red October, Clancy surprised us all by making military lingo seem like plain English. Sundman has equivalent skills when writing about the computer and biological sciences.
and on Geek.com, Sam Evans said:
John Sundman has written a really exciting and fun to read technothriller that has everything you’re looking for. This book is totally cool on an amazing number of levels. . . Once you pick this book up, you won’t stop ‘til you’ve read it all—the pages seems as short as a .15 micron process. Too many technothrillers use the ‘tech’ parts as filler; Acts of the Apostles uses ‘tech’ as an integral piece of the book’s and the characters’ development.
and over on Kuro5hin, Rusty Foster paid me this great compliment:
Acts of the Apostles may well be the ultimate hacker book.