Austin Zane, the multi-billionaire space miner has decided he's had enough of his boring life collecting asteroids and bombarding earth with them, and so picks up a new VR gaming system and the hot new game, Emerilia. Unfortunately, he isn't aware that his entire life is a lie, ala The Matrix, and Emerilia is actually the real world, into which vat grown humanity is thrown at the age of three, thinking they're approximately thirty.
See, this is effectively a medieval fantasy LitRPG, but it's given the full sci-fi background, with nanites and so on to justify magic, mana, level and non-humans. The fantasy world has been created by a star-spanning empire to control the remnants of a humanity that nearly won a war with them, in order to use humanity as an attack dog against the other aggressive species still fighting throughout the universe.
None of which really matters as much as levelling up (or not) for the vast majority of the book. Zane (known as Dave in the game, for as far as I can tell, no good reason) sets up his own little house in an isolated spot and begins to attract attention because his engineered solutions to common problems are unusual in this world. And so a little community of elves and dwarves grows up around him, teaching him the ways of the NPC.
I will confess to not having researched which came first, but sections of this reminded me of Awaken Online: Catharsis, such as the hero being a force for neutrality (or at least the underdog), and the importance of shifting the balance from the status quo. Also, the "evolving" nature of our protagonist, taking advantage of the AI systems power-leveling him because of the value of hard work is getting a bit too close to a moral in some of these works. I'd like to see more people working on exploits and min-maxing within the rules, without having some vaguely handwavey feeling to make them better than everyone else could ever possibly be.
The overall plot arc is somewhat shaky, with a few moments that don't appear to serve any future purpose, and an unnecessarily long climax. The book spends a bit too long getting to the final fight, and then takes a very long time to get through it. As I was reading it, I realised just how little happened in other sections of the book.
However, there are a few components that set it at a higher standard than others, such as the supporting cast. The romance element is neither forced nor completely a "you're amazing and we all want your babies" harem arc, which I've seen too much of recently. The dwarven warband are nicely reminiscent of Thorin's band, and they have a decent spread of personalities. The reversal of the usual virtual world was a nice flip, and a bit more made of that could have been cool.
In the final accounting, I probably won't pick up the next one.
Tagged: Book GameLit Fantasy world Novel Audio