Re: Into the Real by John Ringo and Lydia Sherre

On 10/20/2024 5:06 PM, Bobbie Sellers wrote:

Hello typers and reades.
      "Into the Real" by John Ringo and Lydia Sherrer.
      The heroine of the story is a HS student Lynn Raven, a descendant
of a Lakota warrior.  She is a bit heavy which has lead to lots of
ridicule by vicious Popular students.  At the beginning of the story
she is absorbed in virtual war gaming.  She has constructed male
ex-military persona for the war gaming and is quite high in the
rankings and hired by other parties to help defeat their opponents.
In her own words she loves to kill stuff.
     Her mother is a nurse working nights and is unaware of her daughter's gaming interests being mainly concerned with paying off
debts accrued after her husband's murder while he was working undercover.
     Suddenly Lynn is offered a chance to be a beta tester for the
game Transdimensional Hunter by one of the creators of the game.
She leads 2 teams  to victory in a regional tournament.
"Into the Real" refers to the idea that this young woman has been a
  typical gamer in that she spends all her time in the body-conforming chair in front of her monitor.  She, taking on the role of beta tester, is forced to since it is an Augmented Reality game like the Pokemon capture game played with smart phone and she has to go outside.
Unlike the Pokemon game the Transdimensional Monsters are vicious
and she has to use weapons to defeat the monsters and then collect
what they drop so she is forced to get into shape.
     Now throughout the story various power failures take place and
these are all clues which I put together but at the end of the story
I was totally correct.
     This is very similar to other stories where game players are training for wars or fighting them.  Ringo and Sherrer do good work
and if you have time you should read this.
      bliss

I agree.  I read this back in May, here is my review.  And Baen sent me a replacement hardback for my falling apart MMPB.
"Into the Real (Transdimensional Hunter)" by John Ringo and Lydia Sherrer
    https://www.amazon.com/Into-Real-John-Ringo/dp/1982192577/
Book number one of a two book science fiction series.  I read the well printed and terribly bound MMPB that I bought new from Amazon that was published by Baen in 2023.  I contacted Baen about replacing the MMPB since about 60 or 80 pages fell out as I was reading the book, a replacement is reputedly on the way.  I have ordered the second book in MMPB in the series which is due out in November 2024.
Lynn Raven is a 16 year old girl living with her ER nurse widowed mom in the Baltimore area of the USA in the 2040s.  Lynn moonlights after high school as an old mercenary named Larry Coughlin, a Tier One player in the WarMonger 2050 FPS (first person shooter) online game.  She collects guns and health in the game for resale for hard cash dollars, helping her mom out with the bills and saving money for college.   And she also torments boys in her school, killing their characters randomly in the WarMonger game.
But Lynn has been noticed by the billionaire inventor, Robert Krator, of WarMonger 2050.  And he wants her to move to his new game, an outside AR (augmented reality) FPS game called TransDimensional Hunter, as a beta tester with free equipment and such.  He wants Lynn to step into the real.
As usual with John Ringo books, he dedicated the book to:
"As always
For Captain Tamara Long, USAF
Born: May 12, 1979
Died: March 23, 2003, Afghanistan
You fly with the angels now.".
Lydia Sherrer dedicated the book to her husband.
My rating:  5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating:  4.7 out of 5 stars (1,129 reviews)
Lynn