I have mixed feeling regarding this novel. On the one hand it’s a fairly standard adventure story in which our hero, Will, has to learn to master his power to save a world. On this level, it’s a bit slow moving, but is still entertaining. It’s also a LitRPG in which Will learns to master his powers as if he’s in a game, guided by his AI (more on the AI later). This was quite well done, but isn’t exciting in and of itself. And while on some levels the author tried to make this about truly understanding the way magic works, it kept coming back to how many levels Will accumulated. On yet another level, it’s an interesting story about what AIs will do after the end of the world. I think that’s the tale that future stories in this series will illuminate more fully, but we meet at least three of them in this novel and they are by far the most interesting thing going on.
So why mixed feelings when each thread of the story was by itself entertaining? The novel as a whole never quite came together for me. In the first two chapters, the earth is destroyed and with it every person on it except our hero and it never felt real to me, perhaps because Will’s bouncy personality never really seemed to try to come to grips with what happened. I realize that the destruction of the earth was just a plot device to explain how a physicist got involved in a fantasy world, but if you’re going to include it, it needs to matter, and I never felt like it did. I also had a hard time liking Will. I did, eventually, but it took a while. Mostly he annoyed me for a great many chapters and that’s obviously not a great thing when he’s the hero of the story.