This novel is an example of a modern sub-genre blending hi-tech Science Fiction with gladiatorial combat digital games. The creative advantage which this author uses to great effect is the imaginative choreography available to fighters with a creative variety of skills and powers. The technique, as the scenes in this book show, is not to get carried away with the tech, keeping the reader in emotional contact with the flow of the contest. This maintains the suspense through the fight.
The other necessity in hi-tech literature is to have believable, sympathetic characters readers can connect with. Ren is a great version of a stock character: a disadvantaged lower class technician with unfathomable skills and strong ethics. Taxia is the perfect foil, providing the reader with the emotional contact that Ren’s tough-guy front deprives us of. Several well-rounded secondary characters keep the story solidly rooted in sympathetic reality.
Unfortunately, the MS has a number of sentence structure problems which distract the reader from the flow of the story.
“Glancing over my shoulder, his eyes are nearly falling out of his skull,” makes it sound like his eyes are glancing over her shoulder.
“Lifting my boot, thick red blood drips from it onto the floor,” tells us that the blood lifts her boot.
Minor errors have a smaller effect, but distract us nonetheless. The usage of “lie” and “lay” seems to create the most confusion in writers these days.
Another niggling point:
“…the Anointed should direct their Droid to finish him off right about now! He’s a sitting duck out there,” his colleague instigates.
Using a descriptive verb as a dialogue tag is an example of a writer telling us what’s going on when the dialogue does a perfectly good job of showing the same thing.
And last but not least, the story spends 34 chapters getting us fully involved with Ren, seeing the action from his point of view, and then suddenly Chapter 35 is called “Taxia’s Story,” and the rest of the book becomes hers. Which sort of works, surprisingly enough. We appreciate a more emotional outlook as the themes of the book wrap up.
A highly enjoyable novel with great conflict. Recommended to Hard Sci-Fi and video game fans alike.
Four stars.