Questland

REALLY enjoyable book about a fantasy version of Jurassic Park. This is a love story to D&D and Tolkien and Labyrinth and Narnia and all of the stories I grew up wishing were true. This may as well have been WRITTEN JUST FOR ME, and I loved it.

I first saw this book mentioned in the June 2021 volume of Locus Magazine, and I knew I had to read it. It sounded like a book written specifically for me. A D&D theme park where the tech is so good you can't tell that the Sphinx is an animatronic? A LARP where you do actually have to check for traps? Unicorns and wargs, and dragons, oh my! This had my name all over it.

And I loved it! There's enough believability to the tech that this could conceivably take place in a handful of years, and the show more mentality of the fantasy geeks who are the most excited about this theme park world could be straight out of my experiences. It felt real to me, in the same way that Jurassic Park felt real. Only with unicorns and dragons and giant spiders instead of dinosaurs. You can just TELL that Vaughn loves the concept of this story as much as its intended audience will. (She confirmed all of that in the afterword, but I didn't need to read that to know she was One Of Us. And yes, there was a time when I knew how to read Tolkien's elvish script, even though I didn't ever actually learn Sindarin.) show less

Allie is a professor and a PTSD sufferer courtesy of having survived a school shooting incident where a friend died in her arms. She’s recruited to investigate an island owned by a billionaire that was supposed to be a fantasy playground, but whose forcefield has gone up, isolating those inside. With a small team of mercenaries, she’s supposed to use her knowledge of fantasy tropes—and of her ex-boyfriend, one of the leaders of the team that was working on the island—to restore outside control. It’s an interesting book, no actual fantasy in it but trope-aware and interested in the difference between the appearance of fantasy and its reality/the things that are attractive about fantasy and the things that are not.

This is a weird mash-up of Jurassic Park and D&D. A super-rich guy creates a fantasy-themed park on an island and then loses control of it. He sends in a para-military group and a literature professor with PTSD to return control of the park to him.
The plot of this story does not bear close examination- there are lots of holes. But the action is fun, it is absolutely loaded with a wide variety of geeky references and the high-tech part does not seem so unlikely in this day and age.

library book read 5/29/2023

This is like Ready Player One meets Jurassic Park.

Professor of Comparative Literature Addie Cox is called on by a famous tech billionaire, who tells her that he has taken an island and turned it into a fantasy theme park, but he has lost contact with the island, and a Coast Guard ship that tried to approach it was destroyed and all the crew killed when they hit a force field around the island. He wants Cox to go in with a team of security consultants to find out what has happened at the island. They want Cox because of her expertise in fantasy literature and pop culture, but also because the head of the project is her ex-boyfriend.

So they go to the island, and find that it is full of unicorns, dragons, sphinxes, flying monkeys, and show more other fantasy creatures brought to life by a mix of mechanics and bio-engineering. There are towers and labyrinths and forests and taverns, and quests and puzzles designed to entertain visitors to the island. Cox is torn between loving the idea of her fantasies brought to life, and wanting the danger to be over (compounded by severe PTSD from being a victim in a school shooting).

The story is pretty predictable, but that's fine. This is really fun fantasy fluff. It's full of refences to everything from LOTR, Harry Potter, and Labyrinth to Dr. Demento and Leroy Jenkins. There's nothing profound here, and also nothing terribly original but that's the whole point: the hubris of the island's creators is just as predictable as in Jurassic Park. There's a lot of "just because you can doesn't mean you should." This is a fun, silly, and very enjoyable book. show less

I don't want to be mean to Carrie or to anyone else who enjoyed Questland, but to me this read like a lazy rehash of Dream Park without any of the subtlety, wonder, mystery, or character and story development. The overt preciousness of the main character and her anti-feminist token romance with the antagonist were almost unbearable, and the machine-gun drops of various geek-cred nods came off less like a tribute to the genre(s) and much more like a checklist of callbacks to placate the widest possible audience – not a difficult feat when, as the author describes in her acknowledgments, geek culture has become so decidedly mainstream and overwhelmingly commercial. Vaughn has put to paper what Netflix had already inflicted upon us with show more Stranger Things: an uninspired stream of token nostalgia masquerading as original content. Unfortunately, this adventure has already been run, and it was way better back in the day.

I know Carrie can do better, because her Wild Cards work is right up there with many of the other talented authors in the collective. show less

Originally posted on Just Geeking by.

This book was absolutely everything I expected it to be and more. There’s always that worry when someone’s writing a geeky book that it is going to be horribly cringe-worthy, and I was pretty sure that this was in good hands, but having read the book and then Carrie Vaughn’s acknowledgement’s I can confirm that we’re good folks – she’s one of ours. Vaughn is a self-acclaimed geek (it’s blazed across her website header proudly) and she’s certainly screaming it from the rooftops with every single moment in Questland. From the premise of an island where fantasy has come alive and has been designed and brought to life by teams of designers and engineers who are all geeks themselves, to show more the quotes and random pop culture moments thrown in at perfectly timed intervals.

Then there’s the protagonist Addie Cox. Addie is a literature professor teaching a pop culture course (aka any book geeks dream) and is essentially the wizard of her party because this isn’t a military operation, it’s very much a quest to find out what’s happening and Addie is the only one who speaks the arcane language of fantasy, geeks and gamers. But like all geeks, Addie isn’t super confident, and that’s not because she’s an introvert stereotype who doesn’t go out at all. No, as a geek Vaughn is very aware of the stereotypes and Addie has a complicated backstory that is all too believable in modern-day America. The tragedy and trauma that Addie went through led her to tabletop RPGs and the concise rules of gaming ruled by the throw of a dice helped her get through the darkest times of her life.

It means she speaks a language that none of the soldiers in her party speaks, and as Addie remarks to herself throughout their time together, they may have high stats in strength and constitution like a barbarian but she has the high stats in intellect. Addie sees the world as a roleplayer, thinking of things in terms of dice rolls for perception and at one point she even tells the Captain to make sure he does a perception check. By this point, she’s proved her value to the team and he doesn’t look at her twice, he just takes it under advisement and checks for traps.

My only issue with Questland is how heavily it draws from Tolkien because as regular readers of my blog know, I’m not a fan (an admirer of his skill, but not a fan) and this book is filled with hero worship. Many of the elements of this book and the character themselves are Tolkien hero worshippers and many people forget that Tolkien didn’t actually create elves or dwarves. He just borrowed them from mythology and folklore, and while there is a moment where things are correctly credited to the legends Tolkien admired so much, it is a fleeting moment. It’s understandable; Vaughn is a huge fan herself, and it is her book, I just wish that a book about geeks and filled with geek characters didn’t essentially fall into the stereotype of “all fantasy fans are obsessed with Lord of the Rings”.

Despite my one misgiving about Questland what Vaughn has achieved in one novel is to be commended. There are so many random genuine snippets of conversation that would be at home in any group of geek friends or work colleagues. References to video games, film and book quotes and other pop culture moments are not awkward added to make it look real. It is real. These are like conversations I have on a daily basis with my fiance. Just a couple of geeks being geeks. These dialogue moments compliment Addie’s inner dialogue as a geek seeing fantasy and magic brought to life by technology which is on point at every turn. Vaughn’s rich narrative describing the wonders of the island makes you feel as if you are right there with Addie, uncovering this magical place one step at a time.

Welcome to Questland; are you ready for your quest? show less

Questland by Carrie Vaughn is... not good. It starts out with a fun premise and some interesting character context -- a PTSD-suffering protagonist visits a living fantasy-RPG island and tries to solve the mystery of what's going wrong there -- and then wastes both the context and all the goodwill it built in the first half with some shoddy writing and flawed characterization in the second half, to such a degree that I was thinking of ways to rewrite the book as I read. I have enjoyed many of Carrie Vaughn's other books, but this one feels like it went to press half-edited. A shame.