Violence on New Earth had been banned generations ago and conflicts were now resolved via a computer game called Epic, which everyone played.. If you won, every dream and wish was fulfilled, but if you lost, your life in or out of the game was worthless. When Erik, seeking revenge for the unjust treatment of his parents, subverts the rules of Epic he finds himself up against the masters of the game, the Committee, in a game he dares not lose.
Wow! I liked this book. I'm not sure I completely understood this book, but I liked it and I'm looking forward to the sequel, Saga, which is scheduled to be published May 2008.
Erik lives in a culture where a massive multi-player online game has become the basis of their law and economy. Everyone spends so much time in the game that they neglect daily chores in the real world. And since your wealth in the virtual world affects your status in the real world, everyone scrounges for coppers in the virtual world but rarely try anything that might get their characters killed because then they would lose everything and have to start again. Erik, however, begins to think differently. When he needs to create a new character, he makes a female swashbuckler who has few fighting skills but is very pretty. And when he walks down the streets of the virtual world, he begins to notice that the NPCs are noticing him. And he learns that when he takes the time to explore the game in ways he never did before, opportunities arise which promise to make him very rich and powerful.
The book had a bit of similarity to Margaret Haddix's Hidden Children series in that both of them deal with an unjust or corrupt government and the resistance movement that arises in response.
2 comments:
Epic was the best book I have ever read! I was sad when the sequel was futuristic though. I think he should write a prequel about herold and his training to be an assassin because I think that would be a dank book.
I agree with you. I really loved Epic and was surprised at how different Saga was. I was expecting the sequel to be about the rebuilding of their world. (Have you noticed that there are a number of books where people fight and bring down an unjust government but there are very few that look at what happens next? I think the closest was the last volume of the Shadow Children books by Margaret Peterson Haddix.) It took me a while to get into Saga, though I eventually did.
I wonder if Kostick will continue to write books in this universe.
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