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A review by nimgimli
Off to Be the Wizard by Scott Meyer
3.0
Back in the early days of computer gaming it was pretty common for players to edit save or data files just to see what happened. So say you were playing a game and you had 1,233 gold pieces. You'd look through the data (usually the save) files using a hex editor and find the number 1233 and change it to 100000 and then start that game up and see if your character now had 100,000. If it did then you'd found where the game stored the amount of gold your character had and could change it whenever you felt like.
That's the basic premise here, mixed with a bit of The Matrix. A computer geek discovers that the world (including himself) is just one giant computer program and that he can edit the data files and thus change the world he is living in. It's kind of the ultimate computer geek power fantasy.
It's a fun book and I enjoyed the humor in it, but the actual writing wasn't that strong. I'd call it 'workmanlike' and I guess I'm a snob about such things. Particularly at the start of the book when the main character is alone (so there's no dialog) it all felt kind of monotone. Some readers won't care a whit about this and those readers should add a star to my rating.
In any case, by the end when we are dealing with a cast of characters it picked up and got much better. I don't want to drift into spoiler territory but the author brings together characters that are both very similar in some ways and quite different in others, and uses those differences in some amusing ways.
A fun story; it's the first in a series and I'll probably read the others at some point in the near future.
That's the basic premise here, mixed with a bit of The Matrix. A computer geek discovers that the world (including himself) is just one giant computer program and that he can edit the data files and thus change the world he is living in. It's kind of the ultimate computer geek power fantasy.
It's a fun book and I enjoyed the humor in it, but the actual writing wasn't that strong. I'd call it 'workmanlike' and I guess I'm a snob about such things. Particularly at the start of the book when the main character is alone (so there's no dialog) it all felt kind of monotone. Some readers won't care a whit about this and those readers should add a star to my rating.
In any case, by the end when we are dealing with a cast of characters it picked up and got much better. I don't want to drift into spoiler territory but the author brings together characters that are both very similar in some ways and quite different in others, and uses those differences in some amusing ways.
A fun story; it's the first in a series and I'll probably read the others at some point in the near future.