Just finished rereading Skin Game and have completed the preparations for the Summer of Dresden.
The second half of the book is some of Butcher’s better action, and there’s a whole lot of payoff of seeds planted earlier in the novel. And really pays off the Knights of the Cross in general in a way that’s not stupid, which was always a danger with that whole plotline. Really like how it sets down a lot of threads that could have dragged on forever.
My dear hope is that Butcher has his shit together and this is all in preparation for really getting the major plotlines moving forward in the next double book. Seems likely; he’s no Robert Jordan (or GRRM) so far.
So after Skysworn was finished on Friday, I took a break again from that series to dive back into Murderbot #5, Network Effect. I’m only 4 chapters in, but gosh, I’m loving this so much already. Martha Wells just really has this amazing ability to tell us things that could be considered tedious in most other writer’s hands, but she finds a way to make it riveting. Just an example, but when in the first book, she mentioned the character of Dr. Mensah’s plural marriages, it was just a bit of background flavor text. But now you have to kind of explore that maybe? Ugh, shoot me now, right? I’m not interested. This is going to be so tedious. Nope. Martha Wells knows how to make the family dynamics interesting to the reader and how to go into detail without it being uninteresting. Great stuff. And don’t even get me started on the way she makes action scenes so exciting by making them seem so mundane. She just really knows her craft.
I am reading Dark Mirror, the latest book about Ed Snowden. So far an excellent read that makes me think that the movie Enemy of the State actually undershot what could happen.
Read Don’t Panic, the Neil Gaiman book on Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide in all its various forms. Can’t recap it better than Jorn already did:
Yep, that’s exactly how I felt. Well worth the read for fans of any of Adams’ work.
These are in the newish litrpg or gamelit genre. It’s a genre about VR MMOs. In many the player gets stuck in the game and can’t log out though some have the player going back and forth between the game and the real world.
It’s supposed to be totally immersive VR so once in the game it seems real and the player can feel pain, touch things, etc. Players level up, the stories show stats and allocation of points and acquisition of new abilities, and so on.
It’s a bit of a hot genre. Readers who like these seem to like the game aspects and character advancement aspects of these stories. There’s both normal fantasy and adult fantasy full of sex, including harems. There are medieval game fantasies, SF game fantasies, superhero game fantasies, etc.
It seems to have started in Russia but has spread since then. Like I said, they are popular. Think Harlequin Romances for gamers.
I stumbled across and tried a few of these sort of books before I knew anything about the genre. Similar low budget, straight-to-stream movies have also been popping up in my Amazon/Netflix feeds. Nothing even remotely good so far, but I don’t really have a problem with the concept itself.
These have been a thing in Anime for a while. Think it started with .hack which was actually a game about people being stuck in an MMO, that then got an Anime and Manga etc.
I was reading books about kids getting teleported into D&D worlds in the 70s. It may be newly popular, but it ain’t new. I can’t remember the names of any of them, but there was one where the kids all had magic bracelets with dice on them that would spin when anything dangerous happened. Even little kid me knew it was terrible.
Sure, there have long been books about people from the contemporary world getting transported into a different world. Twain’s Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court comes to mind. Baum’s many Oz books. Etc. Guy Gavriel Kay has some of those too, I believe. Fletcher Pratt and L Sprague DeCamp’s Incompleat Enchanter is another.
The gamelit books are about going into a computer simulation, though. They tend to include stats, leveling, etc. Some even have NPC who can call up and examine their stats. Crusis (Timothy Long) has written one, Shards of Reality. I’d consider them a new subgenre. They seem to be quite popular.
These things always depend on the writer, of course. A good writer can work in any genre and produce something interesting. A poor writer struggles. These gamelit books are nearly exclusively written by indie writers. That’s why I said they are sort of like fanfic but without being limited by IP restrictions.
Fifty Shades of Grey started off as Twilight fanfic.
My feeling is many readers of genre fiction read primarily for story and don’t care all that much about the quality of the writing. So with this gamelit subgenre you give them a story they find interesting with good worldbuilding, and they dig into it.
