
John Paul
As a fan of all things nerd and being of the once shunned nerds of the 80s and 90s I am disappointed. The bright side...the protagonist mirrors the majority of society. Oblivious to the reality of an impending collapse of society he wallows in sad vigor perpetuated by his masters, deep within their matrix like prison. The author lets his politically correct ideals flow with pointless narrative. If you must read it or don't know how an MMORPG works, the author goes into boring detail. Waste not, want not.
1 person found this review helpful

B D (Crash)
- Flag inappropriate
- Show review history
This book maynbe a new low point in literature. Terribly written, awful, unlikeable characters, and just kind of sad and pathetic. I finished it, but got nothing out of it. Nothing. Its boring and repetitive. The characters suck. The pathetic worship of nostalgic "geek culture" is depressing. Anticlimactic ending. Just so, so bad. The writer apparently worships garbage from the 1980s while hamfistedly attacks religion and people of faith....and then essentially abandons the theme. The "romance" sub plot is embarrassingly poorly constructed and realized. The fact that this book is so lauded in certain circles makes me worry about the abject stupidity and dumbing down of our population.
14 people found this review helpful

Eric Schrag
Forewarning: if people making references to stuff you've heard of is your medicine, you will disagree with my review. This book was so tedious. It was a novella of interesting quasi-apocalyptic-future sci-fi wrapped in a giant blanket of 80's references (and other geek-culture references, too). You could barely read this book without reading the brand of a video game, or seeing a character pat themselves on the back for knowing something "obscure." There are a few scenes that really are fun, and unsurprisingly they're the ones where it isn't a festival of nerd in-jokes. Mostly I spent my time rolling my eyes at the agonizing, never-ending parade of shoutouts. Hopefully for his next novel, Cline drops the references and builds his own world. He wasn't a terrible author, this is just a 70 page book with 300 pages of padding and aspirations for cult-classic status.
5 people found this review helpful