88 Names

Hardcover, 320 pages

Published May 13, 2020 by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers.

ISBN:
978-0-06-285467-4
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5 stars (1 review)

John Chu is a “sherpa", a paid guide to online role-playing games like the popular Call to Wizardry. For a fee, he and his crew will provide you with a top-flight character equipped with the best weapons and armor, and take you dragon-slaying in the Realms of Asgarth, hunting rogue starships in the Alpha Sector, or battling hordes of undead in the zombie apocalypse.

Chu’s new client, the pseudonymous Mr. Jones, claims to be a “wealthy, famous person” with powerful enemies, and he’s offering a ridiculous amount of money for a comprehensive tour of the world of virtual-reality gaming. For Chu, this is a dream assignment, but as the tour gets underway, he begins to suspect that Mr. Jones is really North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, whose interest in VR gaming has more to do with power than entertainment. As if that weren’t enough to deal with, Chu also has …

3 editions

The Future is Drawing Closer

5 stars

A gripping cyberpunk thriller. Reading it, I was struck by how much little of it is actually "science fiction" in the sense of describing technologies that don't exist yet. I'm pretty sure the "bullets" described don't exist, but much of the rest could just be a story of the world as it is right now.

And of course, the "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" subplot has been a reality for decades, and is masterfully executed here.