This Is Not a Game--Walter Jon Williams

Walter Jon Williams gives us a fascinating look into the world of online role playing games and gamers.  We start with our protagonist Dagmar flying into Jakarta on her way out of India and back to the U.S..  Just as she does so a currency collapse in Indonesia sends Jakarta into chaos and she finds herself trapped in the city and virtually trapped in her hotel room.  But, she's still connected.  Using those connections and getting the help of literally hundreds, if not thousands of fans, she bests the mercenaries hired by her employer to spring her from Jakarta.

Back in the states one of her best friends from college is murdered and his death caught on film by one of the gamers.  And so it goes.

Williams effectively explores the world in which all of the ingenuity and person power that goes into online games is exploited toward good ends--uncovering a murderer and undoing some of the damage cause in a world-wide currency crisis.

The book moves--fast.  The characters lively and engaging and the story compelling.  The predictive edge is nice, reasonable, and feasible.  All-in-all a nice, effective, near future thriller that will keep you reading. 

Recommended--****

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were sp...
Read more

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take...
Read more