Deathless: The City's Thirst

by Max Gladstone

Negotiate water rights from scorpion gods in this necromantic legal thriller! Discredit your boss, solve murders, and reanimate your own corpse to keep your city from drying out.

Deathless: The City’s Thirst is a 150,000-word interactive novel by Max Gladstone, author of Choice of the Deathless and the Craft Sequence novels, nominated for the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award, the XYZZY award, and the Lambda Award. Your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based--without graphics or sound effects--and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You won the God Wars, killing the rain god and taking over his desert city. But now the city needs water, and it’s your job to make it rain. As a rising associate at a god-killing public service conglomerate, you can monopolize your city’s public utilities, or fight to keep water affordable for everyone. Build alliances with powerful necromancers, or help local farmers hold onto their land. Find love, or betray your friends. Overcome the trauma you suffered in the God Wars. Prevent murders, or commit them.

Just keep the water flowing.

Unknown Binding

First published September 23, 2015

About the author

Max Gladstone is the author of the Craft Sequence: THREE PARTS DEAD, TWO SERPENTS RISE, FULL FATHOM FIVE, and most recently, LAST FIRST SNOW. He's been twice nominated for the John W Campbell Best New Writer award, and nominated for the XYZZY and Lambda Awards.

Max has taught in southern Anhui, wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat, and been thrown from a horse in Mongolia. Max graduated from Yale University, where he studied Chinese.

Reviews

[Luis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is essentially more sophisticated choose-your-own-adventure. As choose-your-own-adventure, it works surprisingly well: there is complexity, and many different paths, which has to have been challenging to write. As a book, I didn't like it nearly as much as the other books of this series (including Choice of the Deathless, the other choice-based game-book-thing in the series) because it didn't treat the subject matter seriously enough. The books in this series about law and lawyers go into smart, but still entertaining, detail about how law is actually practiced: young attorneys party hard, but also have debt to pay; they have dramatic courtroom battles but also doc review. Tying together the mundane and the fantastic is what makes most of this series work, but here it is all fantastic, no mundane. Maybe I'm sensitive because I just read a great book on water rights, which made the point that water problems are usually solved through people and committees- usually this series strengths, which could have been explored more deeply here. Instead, the focus is mostly on the fighting. That is entertaining, but didn't live up to the expectations I have for this series.