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Summary: In Charles ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
autopope Stross' novel set Twenty minutes (more like ten to twenty years) into the future, Constable Sue Smith, just your average happily married lesbian Edinburgh beat cop in the recently independent Republic of Scotland, gets called in to investigate a bank robbery. Nothing new there, except that the "bank" is completely virtual, set in a Warcraft-like MMO and the bank robbers were a platoon of orcs run by Pakistani gold farmers backed up by a dragon.
That's weird.
When Elaine, a forensic accountant with a love of broadswords, and Jack, a burned out games programmer whose whole life is literally online are called in by the MMO's insurance firm to investigate, things get Political very fast and the line between the games people play and the Games governments play start blurring rapidly together.
That's scary.
( It's like the joke about the post-modernist gangster who makes you an offer ye canna understand )
autopope Stross' novel set Twenty minutes (more like ten to twenty years) into the future, Constable Sue Smith, just your average happily married lesbian Edinburgh beat cop in the recently independent Republic of Scotland, gets called in to investigate a bank robbery. Nothing new there, except that the "bank" is completely virtual, set in a Warcraft-like MMO and the bank robbers were a platoon of orcs run by Pakistani gold farmers backed up by a dragon. That's weird.
When Elaine, a forensic accountant with a love of broadswords, and Jack, a burned out games programmer whose whole life is literally online are called in by the MMO's insurance firm to investigate, things get Political very fast and the line between the games people play and the Games governments play start blurring rapidly together.
That's scary.
( It's like the joke about the post-modernist gangster who makes you an offer ye canna understand )
