Nascent – Tony Corden

The year is 2073, and access to virtual reality is normal. Having a chip implanted to facilitate and manage that access is considered a human right. There are human rights and there are political realities: The poor can receive restricted chips with bare-bones AI support.

Virtual reality in this milieu supports many common activities - remote work, remote learning, remote meetings, etc., all in virtually-real settings. It also supports leisure activities - including hundreds of virtual game worlds. Much of the economy has moved to virtual reality, and success in these worlds can translate to wealth in the ‘real’ world. When Aetherleah accidentally receives an experimental chip, rather than the usual free chip, she joins one of these games, as a way to raise enough money to get a good education.

Aetherleah is wildly successful in her game/s. She was already accomplished, and her enhancements give her advantages. She also makes dangerous real-world enemies.

The mix of a real-world story with several virtual-world story lines gives the author the freedom to cross genres. Much of the story takes place in a sword-and-sorcery mmorg. The real world is a somewhat-dystopian cyberpunk setting. Aetherleah’s struggle with a growing cast of enemies takes her to a space-exploration world, a steampunk setting, and eventually others. She continues to be wildly successful - in part because she is superhumanly capable, in part because her care to do the right thing keeps paying off.

I read ‘Nascent’ out of curiosity, then binge-read the next seven books. (Fair warning - book 9 is pending, and there’s no guarantee it’ll be the last.) So yes, it is a very readable page-turner. The author is a bit too heavy-handed in his use of plot devices - for instance, the bad guys never have trouble getting courts or police or the corporations running the games to cheat in their favor. And the protagonist triumphs regardless of the odds. (“You can’t kill a dragon with a dagger!” “I’ll stab real hard.”)

Fun to read. There’s been a lapse (health-related, apparently) since book 8, and I look forward to seeing the story continue.