Oh, yes. This is 2020’s Ready Player One, without a doubt. I regularly give books 5 stars, but this one is going into that exclusive pile that I pick up to reread time and time again.

I laughed aloud at regular intervals. Chu is almost as much of a badass as John Lago, and even if he’s a little more jaded than Wade Watts with a harder edge and more filial piety, he also has a butt-ton of US military support to call in when he needs to.

The multitudinous use of game genres was most excellent, the callouts and backreferencing tremendous (“Ensign Kim” and the INEXHAUSTIBLE PRICKLY HORSE got me); the big reveal foreshadowed but still very, very good fun, and most of all, the thing that I found most rousing was the fact that the lines between VR and RL blurred exquisitely, the action in each felt as real as the other, and that was fantastic. Cline did it well too, and it works to perhaps even a higher standard here.



An unequivocal thumbs up from me. I was hooked on this one and swallowed it in but a few short hours.