C. S. Friedman

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.… (lisätietoja)

A “how it happened” narrative creating the background for earlier novels. Human colonists land on Erna and discover that there’s something that can apparently read their minds and manifest dreams and fears, which they label “fae.” The last quarter of the book jumps far ahead in time, to characters we’ve met before, tenuously linked to the first three-fourths. It didn’t seem necessary to enjoy the earlier novels, but I guess there’s a market for this kind of filling out the narrative.… (lisätietoja)