There is no need to read the first of C.S. Friedman's Outworld books to read an enjoy this second installment. This Virtual Night follows extraordinary game designer Micah Bello as he tries to escape being framed for a terrorist attack on the Harmony Node space station. Eventually he teams up with Ru Gaya, mercenary, explorer and adrenaline junkie sent to find the source of a signal associated with the attack. Their search for the real source of the attack and the motive behind it sends them through a ruined Terran corporate-owned station, a ramshackle station of out-law "scavs", and eventually back to Harmony Node.

Micah's skill as a game designer is not only used to solve many a problem, but the whole story has some feel of a well designed action game. It reads quickly and the two protagonists move quickly from fight to puzzle to backstory to brief RPG and back to more action sequences with twinges of horror & survival. The villain is nebulous and fairly unimportant as long as the sense of menace remains palpable enough to motivate the pair (and the reader).

And just like a good video game doesn't require you to play the original to enjoy the next installment, it also doesn't hurt to have read This Alien Shore. And some comparisons are inevitable.

The history of human expansion into the universe via the Hausman Drive, the consequences, and the ongoing re-unification by Guerans and The Guild are briefly explained all of the variations are just mentioned in passing. The details of Gueran society are hinted at but not explored or explained in any depth. Which is a shame, since the same chapter headings with little poetic descriptions of the Gueran Kaja from This Alien Shore are also present in This Virtual Night but have much less impact without the context.

Micah's own variation is hardly discussed, all of the antagonists on the ruined station are Terran, the default assumption for the scavs is human, and the ones that aren't are just given brief physical descriptions. Compared to a scene in This Alien Shore where a Medusan smuggler & his crewmates are described in great detail physically, mentally and emotionally the variants is This Virtual Night are just window-dressing.

This Virtual Night is quick and entertaining but compared to the slow build and detailed exploration of a novel universe of This Alien Shore it is thin and overshadowed. ( )

I had read the previous book about twenty years and seriously don’t remember a thing about it and that is fine because this book stands on its own. Ru Gaya is an outrider, someone who contacts lost colonies and convinces them that coming back into the greater galactic society thanks to technology that allows for long travel. At the beginning of the book she was asleep for twenty years instead of three and her partner died during the mission. She is more than ready to take a mission for the guild to find the programmer that is responsible for an explosion on a space station. It seems there is a virus infecting people through their VR headsets that changes their everyday perceptions. Ru needs to get the programmer off a seemingly abandoned space station he crashed on while on the run and return him the to guild.

The plot is good and there are some threads that are left that another book in this setting could be written but the reader isn’t left hanging for another book. It did leave me with the feeling that I need to reread This Alien Shore since I can’t remember the plot to it at all since I liked the setting this story was set in.

Review copy provided by the publisher through Edelweiss.
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A sf book about farflung humanity with very of-the-moment concerns: a hacked game convinces people that they’re seeing unreal things, manipulating them in order to destroy human space stations. A scrappy bounty hunter type and a game designer who’s been scapegoated join forces to figure out what’s going on. It’s fun. ( )

Full review coming at the Chicago Review of Books. ( )