This is my third review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the first round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Gamer by Belinda Crawford. The book is available from the author’s site.

Blurb

Vlad – gamer, hacker, scourge… Angel of Death.

Vlad’s parents died in a car accident; she can still feel the flames licking her skin, smell the burning batteries and fire-retardant. Except it wasn’t an accident, someone made it happen.

She’s has spent the last nine years tracking those responsible; planning, plotting.

She’s almost done.

When the last move is over, her opponent will wish they never played with the Angel of Death.

Get ready to jack in and play along as Crawford masterfully weaves a complex, action-packed tale of virtual reality and revenge.

My Review

Of all the books I read during our scouting round, where we read the first part of each book to come to our quarterfinalists, this one definitely had the clearest and most intense sense of style. It dripped with cyberpunk goodness, reminding me of my time with William Gibson’s books, of my many Shadowrun adventures back in the 1990s, and of my heartily enjoyed playthrough of the Cyberpunk PS5 game. Coupled with a strong vengeance motive (as is clear from the blurb above) and a bunch of richly realized game-based scenes, some with a cool LitRPG flavor, and a full cast of characters who would be at home in NeoTokyo or Neuromancer, and you’ve got a rich story based on a solid foundation that I know took a ton of work to put together.

Plot and Characters

The book mostly stays with the main character, Vladana Tong, although there are occasional chapters from other points of view. She’s a handful – a badass hacker, a netrunner, a Scourge (the book’s lingo for someone who plays in the main VR game but hacks the system for advantages), and also on a personal quest to avenge her parents’ murder.

The plot basically follows that whodunit mystery to its conclusion, although there are tons of side adventures full of midnight motorcycle rides, secret hacker lairs, esports and politics, shady megacorps, and skeezeball lowlifes. Vlad has a past life she gave up to steep herself in the hacker world, and some folks reappear from that time with complicated relationships to who she is now. Her parents have left her a confusing and unclear legacy that she needs to unravel to understand why they died. She also falls in with an esports team full of colorful larger-than-life folks. They need each other but don’t trust each other, and there’s a lot of interesting jockeying there as the titular gamer part of the book occurs over a series of virtual-world trainings and combats. There are also shadowy criminal elements, sometimes pursued by Vlad and sometimes pursuing her. If you get the idea that there is a ton happening in this book, you’re one hundred percent right.

My Thoughts

For me, the book’s biggest strength is its vibe, although “vibe” doesn’t really do justice to the complexity and worldbuilding going on here. There’s a huge lingo and futuristic cultural context to everything, from vehicles to tech to clothes to food to game tools to corporate shenanigans, and it runs rich and deep throughout the whole thing. There’s hardly a paragraph that doesn’t have some cool jargon or slang or tech to reveal. There’s a very cool running issue of how the game world works, and the sacrifices that some players make to get an edge, including fascinating descriptions of when characters suffer “lag” when the game world they were so immersed in carries over as hallucinations in “the Real.” The descriptions of the characters and tactics in-game were really fun for me, and the real-world grit and tension is just as interesting.

The vibe is more than enough to carry the book, and it largely does, which I think was probably Ms. Crawford’s goal. I loved all of that stuff, a lot. Where the book was weaker for me was in a few areas. One was a plot that jumped around a ton, focusing on different people and places, sometimes hiding information from the reader that would have been helpful to know. Vengeance plots are a little limiting in general, but the choices here made the story a little hard to follow for me. Vlad’s detective work sometimes made sense and led logically from one discovery to another, but at other times, she found a ton of bewildering stuff that wasn’t always clear to me (or her, I think), until she just pulled on a thread and got somewhere else. I think I would have appreciated more planning and more focus on the detective parts, and more thought than impulse on Vlad’s part in tracking stuff down. Sometimes she made what seemed to be rash and uninformed decisions, and sometimes those turned out to be exactly what she needed, while others were just as stupid as they seemed, but we sometimes didn’t find that out for a long time. She also seemed to be variable in her hacker competence – sometimes effortlessly deadly, and sometimes seeming to make basic mistakes. That made her a bit of a frustrating character to follow – at times, and especially towards the book’s conclusion, she was almost a spectator to her own mystery rather than the active, super-competent hacker sleuth she is in other parts. I may not be smart enough to have understood everything, but I had trouble figuring out the full plot of the mystery and all of the factions involved, although the big bad’s role is spelled out pretty well at the end, and the book has a conclusion that wraps most things up.

Another thing I had some trouble with was the intensity of all the characters, particularly with their emotional state. Vlad seemed to be in a constant state of near-explosion rage, and the side characters were often right there with her. That’s good for a few tense scenes, but it was way too much for me. She made a ton of errors by being impetuous and ragey, too, which added to my frustration. I know that was part of her origin story and her character, but I found that I sometimes wanted her to, like, make a sandwich, draw a bath, and watch some cartoons rather than tearing somebody’s head off in a screamfight, rage riding her bike, or punching herself to exhaustion in the gym. There weren’t a lot of fundamentally likeable characters in the thing, although some of the esports team got there. Even they would have hissy fits from time to time, though, and I just wanted to turn the emotional volume down a little. From an editing perspective, also, there were a LOT of comma splices, at least one every couple pages, and my radar pings at things like that.

Most of those complaints are nitpicks – personal-taste things, not harsh critiques. I did enjoy the book, and I really enjoyed following Vlad’s adventures. I might have made different (and no more valid) choices with regard to plotting, focus, and characterization, but I’m absolutely in awe of the depth and consistency of the worldbuilding, use of language, and vibe. All of this flavor seeped into every scene and sentence, popping naturally and sharply off the page. That’s great work, inspiring both awe and envy in this author, who has never even attempted anything this ambitious.

Summation

This is a solid book that well-deserved its quarterfinalist status on the full read. If you’re a fan of cyberpunk and gamerlit, you’ll find a ton to enjoy here, as I did. A richly-imagined near-future society and gamer/hacker culture spring to life here on every page.