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The Barsoom Project | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Dream Park | Dream Park, The Barsoom Project, The California Voodoo Game | ||
Michele Rivers has played the Fimbulwinter Game at Dream Park before. But that time something went horribly wrong, and a real gun made it onto the set instead of a prop. The resulting deaths have been a mental burden for her ever since. Now she's back, and playing the same Game, and she's having a hard time telling Game from reality. She thinks she really is Eviane, that the world really is plunging into a new ice age thanks to evil wizards. And Alex Griffin, security director of Dream Park, is willing to let her keep playing, for there's an outside chance that it will draw out the perpetrator of the original disaster. Meanwhile, the Barsoom Project, an effort to terraform Mars, is meeting at the park, and saving that from a new calamaty may be more than he's capable of. But if he can't, the project will be ruined - as will Dream Park.
I found it significantly harder to enjoy this sequel, as compared to the original Dream Park. As in that book, the Game is meant to be a tool to help solve the other problems facing the characters. This may be the only way to restore Michelle's sanity, and that in turn might help implicate someone who literally got away with murder. But The Barsoom Project spends way too much time on the Game's plot, and very little on its own!
If the book had been a kind of modern fantasy, with the story the Game lays out being the plot, then this would have been a good book. Possibly a great one; it is that interesting a story. But that story, ultimately, is irrelevant to anything. It's a game. A very good game, a unique game, but at heart it's just a game. Just as most of the characters playing it couldn't ever quite get it out of their minds that they weren't really in danger, neither could I. And so more attention should have been brought on the real story, of investigating these past and possibly future crimes.
Focusing on the Game so much worked in Dream Park because the main character was only playing in order to investigate the other players surreptitiously. That's not the case, here. It's like a book setting a murder at the Monopoly World Championships, and then spending a few hundred pages following the feature game. However much might be on the line for who wins and loses, ultimately the story should be about the murder, shouldn't it? The authors changed the priorities, here, in ways that I just did not agree with.
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