A witty tale that revels deeply in computer-game tropes.
Four young men find themselves transported into a massive, online, role-playing game in this fantasy debut.
Dangalf works at the state unemployment office. His expensive and prestigious college degree remains unused and he hates his job, which offers no creative outlet and saps his individuality. He lives only to play Cronica, a fantasy computer game in which he interacts with other players to complete missions. Dangalf, his roommate Doppelganger, and two others—Elftrap and Nerdraaage—form a team called the Keepers of the Broken Blade. One morning, after a typical long night of button-mashing, Dangalf wakes to a pigeon crashing into his bedroom window. In the kitchen, he and Doppelganger learn that there are two pigeons vying for their attention. The birds carry messages stating: “Heroes, seekers, mercenaries, and adventurers, a quest awaits you!” This prompt matches the one in Cronica. The roommates drive to a secluded wood and find an inn that could have popped up from the game. They also meet in person, for the first time, the young men who play as Nerdraaage and Elftrap (the latter being a handsome guy despite using a female avatar). After detecting four gold coins inside the inn, they drop them into a well outside. The players wake up—in the bodies of their fantasy characters—in a place they recognize as Acadia. For his tale, Deering appeals to readers who have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings series and gamers hooked on World of Warcraft. He doesn’t shy away from the pointed analysis that “Cronica provided...camaraderie, discovery, conquest, and honor,” things that most players “found lacking” in real life. Much of the novel, however, unfolds like a video game, with dwarf, elf, and human characters completing tasks suited to their paths of achievement (slaying dire wolves, for example). While clever, this makes the narrative feel cloistered, for the operations overshadow the mystery of how the heroes arrived in Cronica. Still, the subplot involving Dangalf’s romantic obsession with Elftrap (or Ashlyn, as she renames herself), as well as the machinations of the villain Regicide, should have fans swooping back for the sequel.
A witty tale that revels deeply in computer-game tropes.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-89991-5
Page Count: 494
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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