2 stars. Unrealistic actions by characters ruin the fantasy.
This is an old book that I decided to listen to for the second time.
It has an interesting premise. A wannabe hacker stumbles upon a text file on the Internet that contains a bunch of numbers. He finds his name in the file, and experiments by changing the numbers associated with him. He figures out the one that represents his bank balance, and edits it. His actual bank balance changes. He then goes a bit crazy over the next couple of days, spending all his money and editing the file repeatedly.
Within a couple of days, the FBI arrests him for bank fraud. But they don’t know how he did it.
So begins an interesting story about a guy who can alter the parameters of his life, including the current date and time. He quickly is forced to time travel back to the year 1150. And begins a new life as a wizard in the middle ages of England.
After listening to the book for the second time, it reminded me what I did not like about it.
First Pet Peeve: Illogical Actions
If I put you in the same position as the main character:
- Through hacking, discovers a secret file that you can edit about your own (or others) life
- Can travel back through time (or force others to) with no consequences
- Can cause yourself (or others) to teleport to any location on Earth
What would you do?
If you think about this a little, you could probably come up with a clever way to make money which nobody would suspect. And then you could live a comfortable life in the present day without needing to work again.
The characters in this book almost never act in a logical way.
Things You Would Likely Do if YOU Had This Power
- Like Marty McFly, you could take a “sports almanac” back to yourself 2 years prior and encourage yourself to bet modestly on sports games in Las Vegas, just a few hundred dollars at a time in a way that will avoid suspicion.
- You could take a printout of stock prices back with you a month and encourage yourself to buy the right “out of the money” cheap options which are guaranteed to be 100X more valuable a month later.
- Go back to July 2010, and buy $100 in Bitcoin, store it in an online wallet with a strong password, immediately return to the present time, which would make you a multi-billionaire today.
- You could bet your life savings on the roulette wheel, and if you lose, go back in time 1 minute to change your bet.
- You could teleport yourself through a locked door of a bank vault in another country, and steal a single bar of gold, and return to your own country without anyone ever seeing you.
- You could become a time tourist, traveling around different time periods seeing historical events live.
Things You Would NOT Likely Do If You Had This Power
All of the things characters in this book do. All of them.
- Modify your bank balance (repeatedly, several times per day) to give yourself unlimited money which is easily discoverable through a bank reconciliation process.
- Get arrested and imprisoned the very next day after getting this power.
- Despite having access to amazing powers, give yourself no method of escape in an emergency.
- Once you realize you’re in trouble, not going back 7 days to warn yourself of the life-changing mistake you’re about to make.
- Give yourself no plausible alibi or other explanation other than a criminal one.
- Give yourself no method to even teleport 200 yards/meters away in an emergency.
- Give yourself no save place to teleport where no one can ever find you.
- Travel to medival England to start a new life, by fooling the locals into thinking you’re a Wizard.
Apparently, almost everyone who discovers this hack “gets caught” through bank fraud. I doubt, in real life, that they would. There are just smarter ways to make money if you can control time and/or physical space.
How long would it take for someone to find this file, and instead of making themselves rich (and a wanted criminal), they turn around and create a viral TikTok about it? Everyone would discover this secret within 3 months of its being discovered the first time.
And there are no easy-to-hack servers on the Internet with such valuable data. Script kiddies have tried to hack every public IP address hundreds of times per day for the past 20 years.
I know that this is a work of fiction, and this flimsy premise is required for the story to work, but I don’t like it when the MC (whos supposed to function as a surrogate to the reader) acts in ways that a real person would not act.
Second Pet Peeve: Why Are Wizard Fights So Long
Minor spoiler alert. There’s a point in the book where a group of Wizards want to confront another Wizard for bad behavior. This is a person they suspect has done a supremely bad thing. They do precisely NOTHING to prepare for this. Although they arrive at his home unannounced, once they arrive, they sit patiently in his waiting room, waiting for him to see them.
They talk to him. They follow him as he takes them outside the city walls. They lose their powers in a trap.
There’s literally 100 creative things I can think of to attack an opponent in this world. The Wizards attempting to confront the bad guy do no planning at all to prepare. They don’t remove his powers first before letting him explain himself. Even the bullies earlier in the book are able to trap and disable the wizards fairly easily by taking away their staves and gagging their mouths. They don’t even do that to the evildoer even once they were shown how easy it was to do to them.
Which leads me to my third point…
Third Pet Peeve: The Male-Female Dynamics Are Weird
There is precisely ONE female character in this whole book. She is pretty, and smart, and cunning and saves the lives of the main characters more than once. Every other male character is weak and naive and incompetent.
The very first thing the MC does when he sees her is hit on her. And he gets brutally rejected. The very last thing he does, before she flees to a far away land in a different time to escape all men, is hit on her. And he gets brutally rejected.
I hesitate to even say this or write this. But does the author hate men?
I’ve read over 600 books on Audible and more on Kindle. I’ve never once thought or said this of any book. But this book makes it clear that women “wizards” don’t exist in almost every time period or location except one – the Lost City of Atlantis.
The City of Atlantis, as we learn in Book 2, was founded by women and is run by women. All of the men there are subservient to them. Like an old Star Trek episode.
The book makes it clear that women are unsafe with men around except in one woman-dominated place. And the men of this book prove the point.
It’s just so weird.
