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Talos June #1
Intelligence Block
Talos June performs with the creed of never break character. It lets him hide his awkward self from the universe as the ancient and powerful Wizard Joontal. No one knows the man behind the curtain.
It is a good job, and he has his artificial companions to keep him company as he plays with the most fabulous technologies the colonized planets have produced. Technologies as dangerous as they are exciting.
Content with playing it safe, and slowly climbing up the ranks of techno-wizardry, Talos works passionately in his field. It’s all business until the risks of the job come calling for him, and then it gets personal.
It is a good job, and he has his artificial companions to keep him company as he plays with the most fabulous technologies the colonized planets have produced. Technologies as dangerous as they are exciting.
Content with playing it safe, and slowly climbing up the ranks of techno-wizardry, Talos works passionately in his field. It’s all business until the risks of the job come calling for him, and then it gets personal.
- GenresScience Fiction
224 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 18, 2019
23 people are currently reading
36 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 23, 2019
Weird and entertaining
The worst part of the story is the beginning. We're thrown in the deep end without floaties and we're left trying to figure out what's happening.
While we are exposed to the machinations of the story world as the story continues, it still takes a bit to get there.
Once we do understand the basis though, it's a great piece of entertaining literature and something that I will definitely look forward to reading the next chapter. My only concern on that side of the equation is that I also want to read the follow up to The Crafting of Chess.
The worst part of the story is the beginning. We're thrown in the deep end without floaties and we're left trying to figure out what's happening.
While we are exposed to the machinations of the story world as the story continues, it still takes a bit to get there.
Once we do understand the basis though, it's a great piece of entertaining literature and something that I will definitely look forward to reading the next chapter. My only concern on that side of the equation is that I also want to read the follow up to The Crafting of Chess.
Read
December 20, 2022I have to say that while reading this one there was a moment that made me really want to just drop the book, because it made me so mad! And if it wasn’t for the contest, I would have dropped it without thinking twice about it, because it was just a really really big NOPE. Mind me, the book is good, and I enjoyed it. There are a lot of interesting things in there, and my overall opinion about the book is pretty good but… but even if I can’t really say what enraged me because it would be a spoiler, it was a thing that did not sit well with me at all, and I just have to say this before going on with the review.
We have an interesting mix here of magic and technology, and it was fascinating. I think this is the best feature of the book because it is quite original and well-developed. The second-best thing in there is the UIs. It’s like AI, sort of. They are AIs that assist people in their everyday life, they can have a lot of different functions, they could be specialized in things, and they have mechanical bodies. And they have personalities. And the ones we meet thanks to Talos, our MC, are pretty interesting and… fantastic! You really need to meet them.
And the plot is quite intriguing but for once I would really like to see something that does not put the whole world in peril, I mean, I love when we have high stakes, mind me, but here it was just a bit overdone: I mean, we have a nobody (Talos June is the man behind a small time celebrity, so maybe not really a nobody, but he is not really someone either) who is a magician (a really good one, with a solid knowledge in UI and military technology, sure, but this is simply not enough) and who discover something that made the future of the world hangs on the balance. It is just not so credible. Why the menace wasn’t more local? Or smaller? It would have made more sense. It’s not that it’s the world’s destiny or nothing at all. I mean, there are a ton of options out there!!
And another thing that didn’t work so well for me was the world-building. Here we have so many interesting possibilities, and the author implies that the Universe out there is full of life and wonders but… he does not develop it. At all. It was a bit maddening, to see the tidbits he leave us and nothing else. You know that there is so much out there, it is like an itch that you can’t scratch!
But, as I was saying before, my opinion of the book is not a negative one. Sure, it could have been way better, and there were some things that didn’t really work out for me, but the plot is interesting and the characters are not bad. I wasn’t bored while reading it, and it has some strong Dresden vibes (I am not a fan of the series, because there are quite a lot of things that just do not work for me in Harry Dresden’s books, but here it is just some vibes, and I appreciated them a lot!) so if you are a fan of that series and want something not demanding at all to take you for a ride and meet some interesting ideas while relaxing, you should definitely give this one a try!
We have an interesting mix here of magic and technology, and it was fascinating. I think this is the best feature of the book because it is quite original and well-developed. The second-best thing in there is the UIs. It’s like AI, sort of. They are AIs that assist people in their everyday life, they can have a lot of different functions, they could be specialized in things, and they have mechanical bodies. And they have personalities. And the ones we meet thanks to Talos, our MC, are pretty interesting and… fantastic! You really need to meet them.
And the plot is quite intriguing but for once I would really like to see something that does not put the whole world in peril, I mean, I love when we have high stakes, mind me, but here it was just a bit overdone: I mean, we have a nobody (Talos June is the man behind a small time celebrity, so maybe not really a nobody, but he is not really someone either) who is a magician (a really good one, with a solid knowledge in UI and military technology, sure, but this is simply not enough) and who discover something that made the future of the world hangs on the balance. It is just not so credible. Why the menace wasn’t more local? Or smaller? It would have made more sense. It’s not that it’s the world’s destiny or nothing at all. I mean, there are a ton of options out there!!
And another thing that didn’t work so well for me was the world-building. Here we have so many interesting possibilities, and the author implies that the Universe out there is full of life and wonders but… he does not develop it. At all. It was a bit maddening, to see the tidbits he leave us and nothing else. You know that there is so much out there, it is like an itch that you can’t scratch!
But, as I was saying before, my opinion of the book is not a negative one. Sure, it could have been way better, and there were some things that didn’t really work out for me, but the plot is interesting and the characters are not bad. I wasn’t bored while reading it, and it has some strong Dresden vibes (I am not a fan of the series, because there are quite a lot of things that just do not work for me in Harry Dresden’s books, but here it is just some vibes, and I appreciated them a lot!) so if you are a fan of that series and want something not demanding at all to take you for a ride and meet some interesting ideas while relaxing, you should definitely give this one a try!
May 24, 2019
This one came across my radar out of nowhere. After having read and loved Crafting of Chess (and re-read it several times now), Intelligence Block could not be more different. It has the same love of tech but it tells a story that's more a mystery thriller than a grand adventure. IB is all about wizards and pyrotechnics and the Turing test in a world that has absolutely no magic to it. Everything is tech, the performance, and the art of the storytelling while remaining true to your character.
Talos June is a young man who managed to snag a well paying secure position as his first job. At 23, he's five years into a gig where he performs as the Wizard Juntal, at both public performances and private birthday parties, plus as his duties as a house performer for a large company. In this, he's aided by tech he's built using parts from his uncle's military surplus store and a few artificial intelligences, and he's building his way on an ambitious career path when things go straight to hell and the story really kicks in.
He's forced to give up his career and head back to school but just when you think you're about to go full Harry Potter, the author subverts your expectations and takes you instead into a landscape that's more reminiscent of Neal Stephenson, Robert Heinlein, and Marissa Meyer. There aren't clear good guys and bad guys (despite the initial setup that would create reluctant crusty heroes and swarmy villains in your expectations), and the people you meet along the way all have a lovely richness of reality.
It's by no means a perfect book. Self published, like Chess, Intelligence Block is full of typos (like the word "too", over and over), and weak edits. A development editor would have tightened the storytelling and helped expand the best bits like the meeting between an ingenue and star who is beginning to see the end of her beauty that could have been explored more fully. I thought the interstellar travel was a bit too much -- the book would have worked better in a much tighter system -- but I'm really not complaining.
Falbo should really be picked up by a major publisher and allowed to grow his stories more deliberately. He has the vision and the storytelling down. All that's missing is a bit of polish and the time it takes to craft and recraft a work to a high standard.
If you haven't tried either book, they're on Amazon and they're dirt cheap. If you have Kindle Unlimited, both Intelligence Block and the Crafting of Chess are free to read.
Recommended.
Talos June is a young man who managed to snag a well paying secure position as his first job. At 23, he's five years into a gig where he performs as the Wizard Juntal, at both public performances and private birthday parties, plus as his duties as a house performer for a large company. In this, he's aided by tech he's built using parts from his uncle's military surplus store and a few artificial intelligences, and he's building his way on an ambitious career path when things go straight to hell and the story really kicks in.
He's forced to give up his career and head back to school but just when you think you're about to go full Harry Potter, the author subverts your expectations and takes you instead into a landscape that's more reminiscent of Neal Stephenson, Robert Heinlein, and Marissa Meyer. There aren't clear good guys and bad guys (despite the initial setup that would create reluctant crusty heroes and swarmy villains in your expectations), and the people you meet along the way all have a lovely richness of reality.
It's by no means a perfect book. Self published, like Chess, Intelligence Block is full of typos (like the word "too", over and over), and weak edits. A development editor would have tightened the storytelling and helped expand the best bits like the meeting between an ingenue and star who is beginning to see the end of her beauty that could have been explored more fully. I thought the interstellar travel was a bit too much -- the book would have worked better in a much tighter system -- but I'm really not complaining.
Falbo should really be picked up by a major publisher and allowed to grow his stories more deliberately. He has the vision and the storytelling down. All that's missing is a bit of polish and the time it takes to craft and recraft a work to a high standard.
If you haven't tried either book, they're on Amazon and they're dirt cheap. If you have Kindle Unlimited, both Intelligence Block and the Crafting of Chess are free to read.
Recommended.
May 1, 2023
1001011, 1000110, it says on the cover. Think about it. It means 75 and 70, in binary. Why? Who knows? Shut up, that's why.
This was an easy-to-read and enjoyable mystery / adventure on the (almost literal interpretation of) the theme "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". We open on a fun scene where our technomage protagonist, oops, not technomage, I mean party wizard with nano / military illusion stuff ... attends a kids' birthday party and performs some cool tricks.
From this intro we learn that the Wizard Joontal is essentially a social media influencer and an entirely fabricated persona who does shows and mage-battles and stuff for entertainment. His real name is Talos June, and he's a twenty-something kid who never breaks character as the crusty old wizard in the public eye (which, in this highly-connected future, is just about everywhere).
When the Wizard Joontal is targeted for for-real killing by people blaming him for shit he did back in the past that essentially never existed for the made-up persona, Talos is flung into an ever-complexifying situation where he is forced to retire his livelihood and go into hiding as himself, in order to get to the bottom of what's happening.
Now, I'm not sure if I'm just a big inattentive dummy and I missed it, or if the story really did veer away and go into something else and we'll get back to the Joontal Murder Mystery part at some later book. But what I felt was a very interesting look at a middle-distant-future entertainment industry and evolution of LARPing, roleplay and internet celebrity (to say nothing of the mystery of the persona and its apparent haunted past), instead turned into an also-interesting bigger picture about the UIs and their sentience. If the shift from one thread to the other was laid out and I missed it, maybe it could have been explained a couple of extra times because a few other plot points were nicely-adequately explained and repeated, but this one passed me by entirely. Combined with the strangely abrupt ending of the story, it left me ... unsatisfied.
In short, the UIs are artificial intelligences, the next evolution of the smartphone that most people have with them as a companion, data reference, and in the case of performers like Talos, a projection system for their performances. The story behind them, and - as it turns out - the main plotline of the book, is an intriguing one. When Talos begins sleuthing his way through the mystery of Joontal's would-be assassins, and finds a deep-nested flaw (an "intelligence block", if you will) in the UIs' programming, it leads him down a dangerous road.
Falbo has some issues with apostrophes. They're almost random, and reminded me of the greengrocer's from Pratchett's Discworld "serie's". It was occasionally off-putting, but there was nothing here a good editorial round couldn't fix. And I loved the spin on the "school of wizardry" trope for the future entertainment and media industry, with a fun flavour of 21 Jump Street as Talos goes undercover (as himself) into an academic world he is well beyond, despite his tender years.
What we got from this fun world and cool setup was an interesting and page-turny sort of story, although - like I said - it pivoted unexpectedly and didn't seem to pivot back, presumably saving the full closure for later on in the series ... and it ended too abruptly without any satisfying closure. I don't know if you can pull off an Empire Strikes Back as the first story in a series, but I didn't hate that this was what Falbo seemed to do here. Just ... be ready for it to not actually finish by the end. An over-arching plot that doesn't get a conclusion is one thing, but this one felt like it needed a bit more of an ending.
I also don't know if I bought any of the dialogue and chemistry between Talos and Lily, but this is where it gets very strange. He was her Jedi Master when she was a kid and he was pretending to be an old man, and ... I don't know what the fuck that sort of relationship dynamic would sound like when the disguise is dropped, but it's not this. Somehow. The relationship itself was sweet and Lily was given some agency by saying that she always kind of knew Joontal was younger than he pretended to be, and their age gap in the end couldn't have been that much so her apprenticeship to another kid also doesn't make much sense ... but I was still left feeling obscurely queasy about the whole thing. This is as good a segue as any to the sex-o-meter.
Sex-o-meter
We practically open on sympathetic company funded escort sex, points for sex worker positivity and the de-tabooifying of sex in general. When we move on to Talos having sex with the kid he mentored when he was in disguise as an old man, I mean he was in disguise as he was teaching her, he's not when they fuck, um ... anyway, it got a bit strange for me, although the whole romance was really rather pure and uncomplicated, which I liked. No angst. Talos is barely twenty himself and no more than a couple of years older than her, if that? Like I was saying, I don't get the timeline of when she was a kid and he was teaching her. It seems weird and implausible but that doesn't belong in the sex-o-meter's variables-bucket. At least Talos / Falbo kind of acknowledges the ickiness of it, although I would have preferred a bit more thought on that matter. Maybe even not fucking on the matter. But okay, it happened and it's fine. I give it a Ren fucking Rey out of a possible Obi-Wan fucking Luke on the sex-o-meter. There's no happy way out of this, let's just power on.
Gore-o-meter
There's a goodly amount of magical tech gore and some (actually quite a lot of) incidental deaths, but it's blurred a bit by tasteful curtain-drawing and the clinical high-tech aspects. There wasn't much in the way of confronting gore here. Two gobbets out of a possible five.
WTF-o-meter
What the fuck is Dimi's accent meant to be? And what the fuck is up with humanity being an interstellar and teleport-capable civilization, but that whole tapestry was never really revealed or explained in any way? I know I love an info-dump a little bit more than the average reader, but this needed something. Intelligence Block gets a nuclear wessels out of a possible uwuclear wewels on the WTF-o-meter.
My Final Verdict
I was super duper enjoying the culture and mystery-action of this story, and the cute if slightly cringey relationship thing, and then it just ... ended? They went to Freedom Station, as was more or less telegraphed from the moment the UI bug was revealed as the main plot related to the Joontal assassination attempts, and it just stopped there. I wanted more of a conclusion and some kind of connective tissue, because I was left with an overwhelming sense of "this was really interesting but what was the point?" There were also spelling and punctuation issues throughout, which was a shame but didn't really take me out of the reading. Not very often, anyway. Three stars on the Amazon / Goodreads scale.
This was an easy-to-read and enjoyable mystery / adventure on the (almost literal interpretation of) the theme "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". We open on a fun scene where our technomage protagonist, oops, not technomage, I mean party wizard with nano / military illusion stuff ... attends a kids' birthday party and performs some cool tricks.
From this intro we learn that the Wizard Joontal is essentially a social media influencer and an entirely fabricated persona who does shows and mage-battles and stuff for entertainment. His real name is Talos June, and he's a twenty-something kid who never breaks character as the crusty old wizard in the public eye (which, in this highly-connected future, is just about everywhere).
When the Wizard Joontal is targeted for for-real killing by people blaming him for shit he did back in the past that essentially never existed for the made-up persona, Talos is flung into an ever-complexifying situation where he is forced to retire his livelihood and go into hiding as himself, in order to get to the bottom of what's happening.
Now, I'm not sure if I'm just a big inattentive dummy and I missed it, or if the story really did veer away and go into something else and we'll get back to the Joontal Murder Mystery part at some later book. But what I felt was a very interesting look at a middle-distant-future entertainment industry and evolution of LARPing, roleplay and internet celebrity (to say nothing of the mystery of the persona and its apparent haunted past), instead turned into an also-interesting bigger picture about the UIs and their sentience. If the shift from one thread to the other was laid out and I missed it, maybe it could have been explained a couple of extra times because a few other plot points were nicely-adequately explained and repeated, but this one passed me by entirely. Combined with the strangely abrupt ending of the story, it left me ... unsatisfied.
In short, the UIs are artificial intelligences, the next evolution of the smartphone that most people have with them as a companion, data reference, and in the case of performers like Talos, a projection system for their performances. The story behind them, and - as it turns out - the main plotline of the book, is an intriguing one. When Talos begins sleuthing his way through the mystery of Joontal's would-be assassins, and finds a deep-nested flaw (an "intelligence block", if you will) in the UIs' programming, it leads him down a dangerous road.
Falbo has some issues with apostrophes. They're almost random, and reminded me of the greengrocer's from Pratchett's Discworld "serie's". It was occasionally off-putting, but there was nothing here a good editorial round couldn't fix. And I loved the spin on the "school of wizardry" trope for the future entertainment and media industry, with a fun flavour of 21 Jump Street as Talos goes undercover (as himself) into an academic world he is well beyond, despite his tender years.
What we got from this fun world and cool setup was an interesting and page-turny sort of story, although - like I said - it pivoted unexpectedly and didn't seem to pivot back, presumably saving the full closure for later on in the series ... and it ended too abruptly without any satisfying closure. I don't know if you can pull off an Empire Strikes Back as the first story in a series, but I didn't hate that this was what Falbo seemed to do here. Just ... be ready for it to not actually finish by the end. An over-arching plot that doesn't get a conclusion is one thing, but this one felt like it needed a bit more of an ending.
I also don't know if I bought any of the dialogue and chemistry between Talos and Lily, but this is where it gets very strange. He was her Jedi Master when she was a kid and he was pretending to be an old man, and ... I don't know what the fuck that sort of relationship dynamic would sound like when the disguise is dropped, but it's not this. Somehow. The relationship itself was sweet and Lily was given some agency by saying that she always kind of knew Joontal was younger than he pretended to be, and their age gap in the end couldn't have been that much so her apprenticeship to another kid also doesn't make much sense ... but I was still left feeling obscurely queasy about the whole thing. This is as good a segue as any to the sex-o-meter.
Sex-o-meter
We practically open on sympathetic company funded escort sex, points for sex worker positivity and the de-tabooifying of sex in general. When we move on to Talos having sex with the kid he mentored when he was in disguise as an old man, I mean he was in disguise as he was teaching her, he's not when they fuck, um ... anyway, it got a bit strange for me, although the whole romance was really rather pure and uncomplicated, which I liked. No angst. Talos is barely twenty himself and no more than a couple of years older than her, if that? Like I was saying, I don't get the timeline of when she was a kid and he was teaching her. It seems weird and implausible but that doesn't belong in the sex-o-meter's variables-bucket. At least Talos / Falbo kind of acknowledges the ickiness of it, although I would have preferred a bit more thought on that matter. Maybe even not fucking on the matter. But okay, it happened and it's fine. I give it a Ren fucking Rey out of a possible Obi-Wan fucking Luke on the sex-o-meter. There's no happy way out of this, let's just power on.
Gore-o-meter
There's a goodly amount of magical tech gore and some (actually quite a lot of) incidental deaths, but it's blurred a bit by tasteful curtain-drawing and the clinical high-tech aspects. There wasn't much in the way of confronting gore here. Two gobbets out of a possible five.
WTF-o-meter
What the fuck is Dimi's accent meant to be? And what the fuck is up with humanity being an interstellar and teleport-capable civilization, but that whole tapestry was never really revealed or explained in any way? I know I love an info-dump a little bit more than the average reader, but this needed something. Intelligence Block gets a nuclear wessels out of a possible uwuclear wewels on the WTF-o-meter.
My Final Verdict
I was super duper enjoying the culture and mystery-action of this story, and the cute if slightly cringey relationship thing, and then it just ... ended? They went to Freedom Station, as was more or less telegraphed from the moment the UI bug was revealed as the main plot related to the Joontal assassination attempts, and it just stopped there. I wanted more of a conclusion and some kind of connective tissue, because I was left with an overwhelming sense of "this was really interesting but what was the point?" There were also spelling and punctuation issues throughout, which was a shame but didn't really take me out of the reading. Not very often, anyway. Three stars on the Amazon / Goodreads scale.
July 18, 2019
A techy adventure in a creative setting
Intelligence Block is self-described as “a game-lit inspired space opera”. I’m not very familiar with game-lit or litRPG as a subgenre, but this book certainly has a Ready Player One vibe to its story, writing style, and world. This book contains lots of technical info packed into the narrative about suits, kits, wizard rankings, and the special type of tech-created “magic” that exists in this world. It’s a very creative setting, and I found a lot of the ideas and applications of “magic” quite interesting. It felt very techy and futuristic and quite unique. It works well as a standalone story. The plot progresses at a steady pace as our protagonist, Talos June, fits investigating an attack against his wizard character into his daily life of work, school, social activities, and wizard battles.
The world of Intelligence Block is set in the far future - there are many settled planets, a network of interplanetary travel options, and pretty much every person uses a type of AI that’s bonded to them, called a User Intelligence (or UI) to navigate their world. Some advanced users use UI to create intricate “magic” displays, and make a living as wizards. Talos June is one such user, one of the uncommon self-taught UI geniuses, referred to as homegrown wizards, as opposed to the more common university-taught wizards.
Talos June is a young twenty-something man working his way up the wizard rankings when a series of strange encounters culminate in an attack on his wizard persona. The story is told from his first-person perspective, with a straightforward and conversational style. He is a genius with UI, having tinkered with them from a young age and customized his own three personal UI. As he tries to solve the mystery of the attack on the side, we also follow him through his daily life and see his wizard and technical skills applied in a variety of ways.
Those interested in the game-lit subgenre, or futuristic settings would likely enjoy this read. Readers who like intellectual protagonists and appreciate technical skills and solutions should consider this book.
Intelligence Block is self-described as “a game-lit inspired space opera”. I’m not very familiar with game-lit or litRPG as a subgenre, but this book certainly has a Ready Player One vibe to its story, writing style, and world. This book contains lots of technical info packed into the narrative about suits, kits, wizard rankings, and the special type of tech-created “magic” that exists in this world. It’s a very creative setting, and I found a lot of the ideas and applications of “magic” quite interesting. It felt very techy and futuristic and quite unique. It works well as a standalone story. The plot progresses at a steady pace as our protagonist, Talos June, fits investigating an attack against his wizard character into his daily life of work, school, social activities, and wizard battles.
The world of Intelligence Block is set in the far future - there are many settled planets, a network of interplanetary travel options, and pretty much every person uses a type of AI that’s bonded to them, called a User Intelligence (or UI) to navigate their world. Some advanced users use UI to create intricate “magic” displays, and make a living as wizards. Talos June is one such user, one of the uncommon self-taught UI geniuses, referred to as homegrown wizards, as opposed to the more common university-taught wizards.
Talos June is a young twenty-something man working his way up the wizard rankings when a series of strange encounters culminate in an attack on his wizard persona. The story is told from his first-person perspective, with a straightforward and conversational style. He is a genius with UI, having tinkered with them from a young age and customized his own three personal UI. As he tries to solve the mystery of the attack on the side, we also follow him through his daily life and see his wizard and technical skills applied in a variety of ways.
Those interested in the game-lit subgenre, or futuristic settings would likely enjoy this read. Readers who like intellectual protagonists and appreciate technical skills and solutions should consider this book.
January 14, 2020
Intelligence Block was a book I wanted to love. After reading The Crafting of Chess, I expected more LitRPG goodness.
What I got was more, and less, than I had expected.
The imagination that Kit has poured into this world is astounding. Visually, economically, thematically, the setting of Intelligence Block is a treat. To say nothing of the main character, who takes on very interesting roles and attacks his problems head on with quirky style. The mixture of faux wizardry, tech, and 'familiars' was super fun, and the book did a great job of giving this technomagic a place in the world.
It took a while for the book to get started, to the point where I set it aside for a while before finishing it. When I did finish it, I was enthralled up till the ending, which didn't quite answer all the questions that I feel should have been answered. I was left with a hollow victory for Talos June. If the title on Goodreads is any indication, there may be a sequel that fixes this problem. I really hope so, because this plot is huge and deserves more layers, a bigger wrap-up.
Furthermore, this book really needed an editor. Grammar mistakes or typos are relatively common. If that bothers you, don't read this book.
If you can ignore some hitches in grammar (as I can, being an avid web serial reader) and are in it for the rise, this sci-fi/fantasy mashup may be right up your alley.
What I got was more, and less, than I had expected.
The imagination that Kit has poured into this world is astounding. Visually, economically, thematically, the setting of Intelligence Block is a treat. To say nothing of the main character, who takes on very interesting roles and attacks his problems head on with quirky style. The mixture of faux wizardry, tech, and 'familiars' was super fun, and the book did a great job of giving this technomagic a place in the world.
It took a while for the book to get started, to the point where I set it aside for a while before finishing it. When I did finish it, I was enthralled up till the ending, which didn't quite answer all the questions that I feel should have been answered. I was left with a hollow victory for Talos June. If the title on Goodreads is any indication, there may be a sequel that fixes this problem. I really hope so, because this plot is huge and deserves more layers, a bigger wrap-up.
Furthermore, this book really needed an editor. Grammar mistakes or typos are relatively common. If that bothers you, don't read this book.
If you can ignore some hitches in grammar (as I can, being an avid web serial reader) and are in it for the rise, this sci-fi/fantasy mashup may be right up your alley.
May 20, 2019
Any advanced technology will seem as if magic!
I found out about this book in a litrpg discord when the author posted it was up!
I am so glad I read it! What an interesting story and the world!! Oh my the world is amazing!!
Super high tech slow roll of how everything works and what is important in the world and how it works. I love when an author allows you to discover everything in awesome little bits.
The pacing was perfect, characters are fun, the growth is cool and the plot is an interesting one that keeps you guessing to the end.
Awesome book!!
I found out about this book in a litrpg discord when the author posted it was up!
I am so glad I read it! What an interesting story and the world!! Oh my the world is amazing!!
Super high tech slow roll of how everything works and what is important in the world and how it works. I love when an author allows you to discover everything in awesome little bits.
The pacing was perfect, characters are fun, the growth is cool and the plot is an interesting one that keeps you guessing to the end.
Awesome book!!
April 13, 2023
Finally some SF book with some new ideas. An unusual approach, an unusual world and an interesting storyline with loveable Characters.
It is about a technomage and his AIs.
I was reminded of that Peter Riviera Character from Neuromancer.
It is not deep dark and has a light mood - while the story does not miss dramatics.
Recommended!
It is about a technomage and his AIs.
I was reminded of that Peter Riviera Character from Neuromancer.
It is not deep dark and has a light mood - while the story does not miss dramatics.
Recommended!
May 30, 2019
Different...
Not sure that this is GameLit (or not as I have seen that described), that isn't a bad thing though. I'd almost describe it as Cyber Punk.
That all said I loved the book and hope that there will be a sequel.
Not sure that this is GameLit (or not as I have seen that described), that isn't a bad thing though. I'd almost describe it as Cyber Punk.
That all said I loved the book and hope that there will be a sequel.
June 7, 2019
What to expect
I have to say I did not know what I’d gotten myself into. However, I’m glad that I’ve picked this up and have read it. Fascinating and captivating, as well as well written! You won’t be disappointed!
I have to say I did not know what I’d gotten myself into. However, I’m glad that I’ve picked this up and have read it. Fascinating and captivating, as well as well written! You won’t be disappointed!
April 21, 2020
Different but good
I enjoyed this tale that was quite different in its setting to anything else I have read. The ending was a little abrupt as I felt there was more to be explained but not altogether unreasonable.
I enjoyed this tale that was quite different in its setting to anything else I have read. The ending was a little abrupt as I felt there was more to be explained but not altogether unreasonable.
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