Invading the System
from Upstream Reviews
Upstream Reviews is back from winter break and just posted my long-form review of Invading the System by Inadvisably Compelled.
The Story
When the System came to Earth, we were well into our post-singularity utopia. We had digitally-emulated citizens, swappable GM super-bodies, and Von Neumann nanotech capable of turning anything into anything else.
Then a magical portal showed up and flooded our planet with “essence,” which broke any technology more potent than a wheelbarrow. It replaced cities with procedurally generated dungeons and opened a window in everyone’s mind telling them they could earn essence and level up if they killed their neighbors.
Fortunately, all of the fabricators, bio-forges, and computronium in the rest of the solar system still worked. The No Fun Allowed War eventually retook the Earth, but a single digital soldier embodied in a living tank decided that one planet freed was not enough. The System Must Be Destroyed.
All of the above takes place in the first sentence of the book, as “Cato,” our hero, dashes through the collapsing portal and enters the System.