Reviews

The Accord by Keith Brooke

itiselizabeth's review

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2.0

I read this as the first book I've ever read with the Sprint app I downloaded as it's one of the books from a storybundle that I can have in epub format to try it with.
The basic structure of the sentences, I think, really helped with the speed reading. But the constant flickering between points of view made it difficult to keep up sometimes.

Story-wise, I'm not too sure about this book. They covered some really fascinating issues with creating a digital 'heaven' so there were elements that I enjoyed, but overall I didn't much care for it.

standback's review

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3.0

It's great to see a book giving so thorough a treatment to the SF-nal concept of simulated reality - it's an idea I consider to have been unfairly neglected; "The Accord" delivers on this in spades. The core concept is a world on the brink of disaster, pinning its last, best hope on escaping into simulated reality. It's a mixture of despair and wonder, because the new world is miraculous - but it's firmly rooted in the ugly, tragic reality left behind.

The concept is extremely worthwhile; the book itself is not without flaws. Particularly, I found the main character and his goals to be almost entirely unsympathetic (the villain is a bastard, but he's entirely correct when he describes the protagonist as an arrogant bastard with aspirations to godhood), and the rules the govern the simulated reality are arbitrarily determined and arbitrarily manipulated to serve the plot.

Nonetheless, the book is overall quite enjoyable. This is a great book to pick up for its consideration of topics that genre fiction often neglects unjustly.
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