Lovely read. Would you like a book that is equal parts SF and fantasy, where the tech doesn't feel dated after two decades, and the final scene is an Advent celebration? Then this is your book.

I picked this up because I loved "The Interior Life" by the same author. I was not disappointed. ( )

This has been in my library since it came out, and I've just picked up the e-book. Heydt is offering them as a free download (with tip jar), so I got it along with some other titles I'd not previously seen.

Sir Mary de Courcy is a virtual knight; she plays in the VR world of Chivalry as a tourney knight. At a tournament, she defeats a knight who is unable to pay his ransom, and offers her a (virtual) manorial holding instead. However, the holding turns out to be a poisoned chalice - on the way home, her plane nearly crashes, she's driven off the road, and an intruder breaks into her house that night. Nest day, while helping to train new players in VR, someone sticks a hacked digitalis patch on her...

It turns out the manor is illegal; it's being used as a back door into a fantasy VR game based on a book - and the creator has forbidden any VR or other derivative work. The hackers are willing to kill to protect their secret.

It's very good; it's set in the near future (unspecified how far ahead) but Heydt was prescient in terms of global warming (although this USA is not in denial). There's been a bit of updating - the copyright of life+50 has been updated to life+70, and there's maybe some other minor tweaks.

Recommended - it's an interesting take on cyberpunk.

Love it - as always. The SCA as VR is a wonderful concept, and so are the other worlds. Virtual dungeon-delving sounds like a lot of fun...not personally interested in war reenactment or mecha, but those who are would love that too. Programming as magic, and functional - recognizable code and comments, visible to those that have the rights to see and/or modify them. And then the functional uses of VR - that's one thing I didn't see, much, in Omnitopia Dawn (well, virtual conferences...and actually, the file structure for Omnitopia itself showed up that way, we just didn't see it being used elsewhere). Anyway. Fun story - mystery, and quest, and enough slice-of-life to see how the world works in this universe. There are just a few infodumps - places where a phrase was used that is the only thing a member of the SCA would have said in that situation, that would be totally opaque to someone who hadn't gotten an explanation - and the book just gave the explanation, without making it so that the speaker was explaining _to_ anyone. I stumbled over those, but nothing too terrible, and writing around the problem would have been complicated at best. Very very good - one of those rare "bests" among books for me. I've read it literally dozens of times and expect to do the same again. ( )