Title: Ten Gentle Opportunities
Author: Jeff Duntemann
Genre: Fantasy / Science fiction
Price: $2.99 (ebook)
Publisher: Copperwood Press
ISBN: B01AQ1549E
Point of Sale: Amazon
Reviewed by: Chris Gerrib
So I’ve been a fan of Jeff Duntemann’s writing
for some time. This, his newest novel
and first since 2006, was well-worth the wait. The novel opens with one Bartholomew Stypek on
the run from a magician in a fairly low-tech fantasy setting. The chief difference between this world and
the bog-standard Fantasyland is that magic can be bought and sold like salt,
and worked at least in part by non-adepts.
Stypek’s on the run because he stole ten “Opportunities” (raw magic)
from a magician, who wants them back.
Desperate to save his hide, Stypek throws himself
at the mercy of the Continuum, and asks to be sent far away. This is where things get interesting, because
Stypek ends up in our immediate future (late 2020s’) in a small town
advertising agency. The ad agency has a
prototype AI-built copier, and in our world magic maps to software. Stypek has (or rather concocts) a Gomog as a
traveling companion. In our world, said
Gomog is an AI, and gets loose in the Tooniverse, a virtual space where various
AIs live. Unfortunately for Stypek, the
magician who’s after him can and will follow him to our world. Mayhem, entertaining mayhem, ensues.
A lot of the attraction of this book is the
clever writing. Several AIs of various
levels are point-of-view characters, as are a number of humans. Stypek keeps trying to map our world to his
kings-and-magic one, and the humans and AIs keep trying to map Stypek’s magic
to bits and bytes. The conflict and
confusion between these world-views is amusing and realistic.
The interpersonal conflict and characterization
is also well-done. Two of the human
characters are a divorced couple, forced by economics to work together, and
then get sucked into Stypek’s life-or-death struggle. One of the AIs learns to dance, which proves
to be a critical skill.
There were two nits that bothered me in this
story. First, one of the AIs, Simple
Simon, is in charge of running a robotic factory in which the parts and the
finished products (copiers) are thrown in the air instead of moved via conveyor
belts. It felt a bit too convenient for the
author. The other nit was the AI dancing
– I saw that coming a mile away.
Having said that, I was easily able to suspend
my disbelief and take a rollicking ride with Jeff Duntemann and his Gentle
Opportunities. Highly recommended.
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