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Saturday, August 09, 2014

Review: John Golden: Heroes of Mazaroth by Django Wexler


John Golden: Heroes of Mazaroth
Author:  Django Wexler
Series:  John Golden
Publisher:  Ragnarok Publications, August 11, 2014
Format:  eNovella
Review Copy:  Provided by the Publisher
Cover design: J.M. Martin

The world's most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Tens of millions of players have stepped into the shoes of fighters and wizards, dwarves and koalamancers to battle the forces of evil.

>>Nobody ever asked the forces of evil how they felt about it.<<

John Golden has been asked to extract a fairy from the computers of a finance company, where it's sitting on some vital data. Inside, he finds a depressed Dark Lord and a portal to a realm of fantasy. But when he steps through, he finds himself cast as the villain of the piece, with an army of adventurers ready to thwart his evil schemes. John hasn't *got* any evil schemes, but he realizes he'd better come up with some fast. Unless he can change the story, he'll be stuck in Mazaroth as a final boss...permanently.


Qwill's Thoughts

John Golden: Heroes of Mazaroth is a ridiculously fun story from Django Wexler, author of the Shadow Campaigns flintlock fantasy series. John Golden is a debugger: he removes fairy infestations of various kinds from computer systems. In Heroes of Mazaroth he ends up in an MMORPG while trying to get a fairy to come back to the game and out of his client's network. Hilarity ensues.

While a novella, (47 pages on my Nook) Heroes of Mazaroth is extremely well done, jam packed with action, and fun to read. Laugh out loud fun! John, accompanied by his immensely helpful sidekick Sarah, takes on a depressed fairy Dark Lord, a variety of online gamers, and a murderous Dark Elf. 

As you can tell, I really enjoyed this story. It's light, fun and well-written. I particularly enjoyed the footnotes which is how Sarah communicates with the reader. She shares all sorts of information - illuminating, amusing and ofter sarcastic. I love how Wexler has merged fantasy and computer science to create the wildernet (our internet + fairies). You don't have to be into computers or online or other gaming to enjoy the heck out of this story.

Sarah mentions other of John's adventures in the footnotes only one of which is available now (John Golden: Freelance Debugger). I am looking forward to reading all of John's adventures. I am completely hooked on the world Wexler has created in these stories. More please and soon!





Also in the series

John Golden: Freelance Debugger
Ragnarok Publications, February 1, 2014
eNovella

John Golden is a debugger: he goes inside the computer systems of his corporate clients to exterminate the gremlins, sprites, and other fairies that take up residence. But when he gets a frantic call from Serpentine Systems, a top-of-the-line anti-fairy security company, John finds out he's on much more than a simple smurf-punting expedition.

With the help of his sarcastic little sister Sarah (currently incarnated in the form of a Dell Inspiron) and a paranoid system administrator, John tackles Serpentine's fairy problem. But the rabbit hole goes deeper than he thinks, and with the security of all of the company's clients in danger, there's more at stake this time than John's paycheck!





About Django

Django Wexler graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with degrees in creative writing and computer science, and worked for the university in artificial intelligence research. Eventually he migrated to Microsoft in Seattle, where he now lives with two cats and a teetering mountain of books.

He is the author of Roc's military 'flintlock fantasies' The Thousand Names and The Shadow Throne and the middle-grade fantasy The Forbidden Library.

When not writing, he wrangles computers, paints tiny soldiers, and plays games of all sorts.


Website  ~   Facebook  ~  Twitter @DjangoWexler


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