By Neal Stephenson
This book was a slough to get through.
The hardest I have had with a book in a long time.
The book starts with a bit of near future science fiction, and that is my favorite part.
I do like the idea to explore how do humans who have had their brains digitally scanned “boot up” there Is a lot of potential with that idea. That they all want to live in the middle ages does not make any sense.
It then describes a person playing what seems to be a very boring game of Civilization, detailed in excruciating details. This takes up a looong part of the book.
This eventually gives way to a quest, which sounds like a mediocre game of Dungeons and Dragons which again is boring and takes forever.
I am proud of myself to have finished this book.
I kept hoping that there would be something great coming around the corner but there wasn’t.
I should say I am usually a fan of Neal Stephenson, and he has written some of my favorite books so I came to this with high expectations. Amazon in part describes it as “entertaining science fiction thriller”. That is just false marketing. Every part of that is wrong.