I picked this book up after reading The Turquoise Lament because I have a twee goal of reading all of the Ben Wolf books I own if not this year then before I find myself in Davenport, Iowa, again.
When I read his Tech Ghost series, most recently The Ghost Pact and The Ghost Plague, I said that his plotting and pacing seem to have been heavily influenced by video games. This book absolutely leans into it. In it, a techbro CEO who steps all over the little people, which is everyone else, pushes ahead to launch an immersive online video game universe over the concerns of a very attractive underling and his brother’s objections. He straps himself into a pod for the launch, and he’s then in the game with a billion other players. Loot boxes from the sky drop initial classes, and he lands a good one–until a woman comes and steals his class information, leaving him alone to take on the only thing left–a rickshaw driver. He becompanions a space octopus NPC and goes on a series of sidequests as he tries to find a way out.
He comes to learn that the woman who stole his class is actually the woman who tried to stop him in the real world. A programmer/analyst, she built in some extra features into her avatar for troubleshooting, but it seems like the AI in charge wants to keep them in the game forever–or to kill them, which might or might not be permanent.
The authors clearly had a lot of fun with it. They make puns on a variety of video game properties, make light of a lot of the conventions, and because of the game world’s child-friendly rating, they get to throw in a lot of fake-swearing where the bad words are replaced by innocuous equivalents.
So a fun read, a little more smooth than Wolf’s earlier work. As he has a co-author here, I’m not sure if it’s the other author’s influence or if his own writing has improved. Probably a bit of both.
That said, I’m not sure how fast I want to delve into other 300+ page books in the series. Fortunately, he probably won’t have too many more available next October, and its novelty might reset by then–and I’ll remember I had a good impression from this book.
