Battle of the Linguist Mages is a super-dense and surrealist political SF/fantasy by Scotto Moore. Released 11th Jan 2022 by Macmillan on their Tor imprint, it's 448 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.
This is such a trippy read. On the surface, it's a virtual reality mashup with a female player who dominates at a game franchise called Sparkle Dungeon. She's recruited to work on an upcoming game in the franchise and finds out that the voice-overs contain words of power which potentially have the power to control people. Under the overlying layer of the plot is the world building, with higher thought comprising a different dimension called the logosphere where sounds have power.
There's a fair bit of navel gazing and pontificating, but overall, it's an interesting if difficult/dense read. There is a lot of theoretical linguistics and a frenetic RPG/VR machinery which won't appeal to all readers, but will absolutely knock the socks off of gamer language nerds (I mean that in a good way, you're my people, I come in peace).
The unabridged audiobook version has a run time of 17 hours 14 minutes and is capably narrated by Justis Bolding. She has a young midwest American accent which suits the main character. She does a good job of the different accents and although this is a difficult and often confusing read, she manages to be precise and unobtrusive. Sound and production quality are high throughout the read.
Four stars. It's anything but mainstream, but for the target audience, it's quite good.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes
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