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I truly can't recall how this book got onto my 'to read' pile. I think, I intended to start reading the author's Jack Parlabane series, but couldn't find [b:Quite Ugly One Morning|289169|Quite Ugly One Morning (Jack Parlabane, #1)|Christopher Brookmyre|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1316975930s/289169.jpg|2959104] and settled for this one. I'm glad I did.
First, if you're not a computer gamer of have never been a gamer you're going to miss a lot of the story. Computer gaming is a necessary context.
Prose is good. Dialog is better than action sequences. Note most of the dialog, particularly the protagonist's inner-dialog, is in Scottish English. It is can be entertaining, if you're a fan of Scottish Lad Speak and irony. I would categorized this book as being YA. The violence is not particularly graphic and there are no naughty bits. The flash forwards and backwards were not as well implemented as they could have been.
There are a minimum of characters in the story. Ross, the protagonist, is a conflicted geek who just happens to be an ex-Gaming Otaku. He is the best wrought character. Everyone else is a bit thin and have been seen before. The subordinate characters were not all NPCs. Both female characters Iris and Juno did have a limited range of interaction. Unfortunately, Iris was too 'good' a bad gal to be a villain and Juno never really got off the ground. The bad guy was too stupid to be an evil genius.
The plot is a mashup of the Inside a Computer System and the AI Takeover tropes embedded in the Hero's Journey. The plot was semi-predictable. I thought the author stretched-out the hero's journey longer than it had to be.
World building was a good description of some '80's and '90's computer games. The tech of the computer games-verse both software and hardware was accurate and well done. It left me nostalgic for computers without gigahertz base clock speeds. Tech outside of the gamer realm involved a bit of hand-waving.
This wasn't a bad story. Although, it was not great either. The badinage was good. The plot was a Scottish re-spin of some well-worn tropes, liberally garnished with red herrings. I can't help but feel that the author could have written a 'tighter' book. (I thought it was flabby.) In the story, he leaned too heavily on irony and nostalgia when he should have been advancing the plot and developing the story's few characters.
I'm going to give the author another try by looking harder for those Jack Parlabane books.
First, if you're not a computer gamer of have never been a gamer you're going to miss a lot of the story. Computer gaming is a necessary context.
Prose is good. Dialog is better than action sequences. Note most of the dialog, particularly the protagonist's inner-dialog, is in Scottish English. It is can be entertaining, if you're a fan of Scottish Lad Speak and irony. I would categorized this book as being YA. The violence is not particularly graphic and there are no naughty bits. The flash forwards and backwards were not as well implemented as they could have been.
There are a minimum of characters in the story. Ross, the protagonist, is a conflicted geek who just happens to be an ex-Gaming Otaku. He is the best wrought character. Everyone else is a bit thin and have been seen before. The subordinate characters were not all NPCs. Both female characters Iris and Juno did have a limited range of interaction. Unfortunately, Iris was too 'good' a bad gal to be a villain and Juno never really got off the ground. The bad guy was too stupid to be an evil genius.
The plot is a mashup of the Inside a Computer System and the AI Takeover tropes embedded in the Hero's Journey.
Spoiler
The MacGuffin is that the virtualized reality is vintage and contemporary computer games.World building was a good description of some '80's and '90's computer games. The tech of the computer games-verse both software and hardware was accurate and well done. It left me nostalgic for computers without gigahertz base clock speeds. Tech outside of the gamer realm involved a bit of hand-waving.
This wasn't a bad story. Although, it was not great either. The badinage was good. The plot was a Scottish re-spin of some well-worn tropes, liberally garnished with red herrings. I can't help but feel that the author could have written a 'tighter' book. (I thought it was flabby.) In the story, he leaned too heavily on irony and nostalgia when he should have been advancing the plot and developing the story's few characters.
I'm going to give the author another try by looking harder for those Jack Parlabane books.