Book: Walter Jon Williams 'This Is Not A Game'

I grabbed this off the sci-fi paperback shelf at the library without really looking at it, because I was desperate and because the tagline on the cover is sort of cool ( 'a novel of greed, betrayal, and social networking'). This technique of reading-material-acquisition usually leads to me reading half of a boring book, getting bored, and giving it to someone else so they can become bored too. I actually made my dad, Mr. Scientific Guinea Pig, read this one first, because I was worried it would be too boring for me. He loved it! After I watched him rapidly turn pages while gleefully chortling for a couple of days, it became imperative that I read the book myself. I'm awfully glad I did, because it's awesome!  The combination of ARGs, rampant gold-farming bots running amok, product-of-Caltech geeks who accidentally crash bits of the global economy, and also a handful of murders, makes for a most excellently thrilling read.

Special bonus: a lot of writers in the cyberpunk genre seem to find it impossible to write convincing female characters*. I think this is mostly because they sit down and try to write about a 'girl' as opposed to writing about a 'person,' and everyone knows that girls don't think or act anything like normal people do. Mr. Williams understands that gender is irrelevant to geekery; protagonist Dagmar, who is most definitely a geek, is a very believable girl character just because she thinks and acts like a geek rather than like a geek's idea of a girl. This is delightful.

* excepting the illustrious William Gibson, whose Bigend Trilogy is full of wonderfully lifelike ladies who bear a suspicious resemblance to human beings.