When reading the book's blurb, I thought the idea of using linguistics as the basis of a magical system was reason enough to get my grabby little hands on an advanced copy. I might have screamed when my wish was granted.
That being said, while the concept remains absolutely intriguing, the pace of the book might not be to anyone's liking.
The reading experience was definitely an intense one. The premises of the book are fantastic, but the worldbuilding is extremely dense, putting together many more elements that I had anticipated. I appreciated the aesthetic and the many references to both contemporary and 80s/90s details, even though this inevitably meant slowing down the flow of the story with some info-dumps.
I will admit I honestly did not expect the plot to stretch out as far as it did, and what a crazy plot it was. At times, though, I got the feeling it was trying to keep too many threads under control, with some of them inevitably escaping, at least from my memory. It did not help that characters lack a bit of individuality, making it hard at times to follow the story.
Summing up, if you like fast-paced books with in-depth characterisation, this might not be the book for you. If istead you want to embark on a long, crazy trip based mostly on conceptual metaphors, you might want to give this a try.

I loved the concept (I'm a sucker for scifi stories rooted in linguistics) but this was just too dense. The over explaining of worldbuilding made boring what could have been a great book

It was definitely a fun read with a very interesting premise. I was excited to read a fantasy that incorporated linguistics. I’m a bit of a language geek and this was different from anything I’d read before. I loved the writing style. The main character’s voice was funny and entertaining and all the characters had that same dry, sardonic humor that I like. My biggest issue with the plot was pacing. Since this is a plot driven story it is fast paced for the most part, but it drags a bit in the middle and then ends abruptly. It felt like a huge build up to a boss battle that lasts all of five minutes. I don’t think the ending did the book justice.

This is the most fascinating concept I've seen in years, but its style is not for everyone.

Some titles are an insta-buy. One cannot see a novel called Battle of the Linguist Mages and not buy it. So it has that going for it. However, this novel is very specifically geared toward its own inimitable combination of tastes. You'll need to sustain a high tolerance for a bright neon nightclub aesthetic and extensive speculations on theoretical linguistics and an RPG-style narrative structure with quests and milestones and leveling up and trippy journeys to extradimensional battlefields made of pure abstraction and perennially snarky dialogue that goes out of its way to make every electronic music pun English will allow and nobly principled anarchist rebel fighters who never stop reminding you how so very nobly principled anarchist rebel fighters they are.

It starts great, don't get me wrong. But unless you're inured to the taste this book requires, it can quickly become too much.

Our protagonist is Isobel Bailie, an Extremely Online young woman who prides herself in crushing the leaderboard at the MMORPG Sparkle Dungeon. She slays rainbows; she battles bejeweled assassins; she rules benevolently over the dance floor that is her domain. But the musical spellcasting system in this videogame is secretly the training grounds for an ethically contortionist ad agency that has discovered a way to weaponize the building blocks of language. You just give them some time and, with enough cleverly phrased messages, they can take over the world.

To me, it makes every sense that the shady corporation in a punk rebellion story with wordplay-based combat happens to be an ad agency. As the holder of a business degree and half a communications degree, I can definitely confirm that marketing is the Dark Side of rhetoric. So when our heroine is recruited by this company as a junior project manager, it doesn't take long for her to be embroiled in a breakneck political conspiracy with vast repercussions for the whole cosmos.

To give you just an example: in a fairly early scene, we learn that the punctuation marks are an incorporeal alien species that has lived in the human mind since before civilization. And that's not the half of how weird this book gets from there.

To quote Illidan Stormrage: you are not prepared.

The early chapters show us Isobel learning to use a repertoire of difficult magic words that twist human perception and thereby alter reality. But her rise in the world of corporate verbal manipulation and subliminal political campaigning is thwarted by an independent faction that has devised its own magic words and opposes what it sees as humankind's bondage to an alien intelligence. With lightning pacing, Isobel's adventure takes her from our world to the realms of tangible thoughts and written code. When language is your weapon, anything you can describe in the source code of reality can be spoken into existence. Soon the limits between what is real and what is merely imaginable are blurred with indelible glitter.

The concept is so mindblowing that I didn't mind the sheer length of infodump this novel threw at me. I was so fascinated by the possibilities of its magic system that I ate up every scene of exposition. I must warn, however, that Isobel's first-person narration takes a good amount of getting used to. The prose here must be commended for producing the most convincingly girly girl I've seen emerge from the pen of a male author, but her inner monologue is supersaturated with pop culture references and deflecting irony and genre-savviness and multiple meta-layers of internet lingo and, for some reason, strongly opinionated remarks on dance subgenres. If that's your jam, you'll absolutely fall in love with Battle of the Linguist Mages. As for me, I had to take frequent breaks to breathe. I'll say this for Scotto Moore: he succeeds at making Isobel's voice an intense presence throughout the book. I just felt it turn too intense at times. Maybe I'm old.

Battle of the Linguist Mages is, quite appropriately, built on metaphor. The cosmic enemies of our brave anticapitalist warriors are, in one corner, an uncaring force of insatiable consumption, and in the other corner, a self-proclaimed lord who feeds on the strength of the masses. The plot presents interesting scenarios about the human cost of hoarding power in too few hands and the inherently corrupting effect of tools of dominance. But Moore can't resist the impulse to turn his world-ending scenario into material for joke after joke after joke until it's hard to believe in the threat anymore.

Even the last chapter, which is written in the strongest voice of the book, ends too quickly. This is a common pattern here. Once Isobel becomes a being of bits and ideas, her invincibility comes off as cartoonish, and there's no longer any reason to fear for her. At the end of the novel's repeated succession of, frankly, low-tension battles with no real losses, the truly epic climax promises a resounding bang, and instead deflates without even a moment to savor the heroine's victory. This would have been easy to fix by writing more transitional material, but instead the impression that remains in my mind is that of a gorgeous multicolored soap bubble that pops, and that's it.


The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for a brilliant and original concept, +1 for devoting an entire chapter to a poetic first-person description of the existential confusion of teleportation.

Penalties: −1 for tonal inconsistency, especially its often misplaced sense of humor, −1 for battles that resolve too neatly and never really convey a sense of danger, −1 because Isobel's rivals turn to her side too easily. As a pacifist, I'll applaud any heroine who makes allies out of her enemies, but the way those conversations are written lacks sufficient tension to make each change of mind land with the weight it calls for.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

I love linguistics - I studied it at university - and I've been a gamer for most of my life. So I was super keen on this book. Unfortunately, the amount of info-dumping, combined with the reliance on characters we don't meet and events that happen offscreen, slowed the place so much that I just couldn't get through it. For a book based on dance music, the tempo was ridiculously slow.

"Except of course that I had no fucking idea what the power morphemes actually "meant" and generally felt like I was speaking some ancient Martian language that was once fluently spoken by aliens born with five sets of vocal chords."

Jesus, where do I even start with this one? Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge but I wish I'd never requested it in the first place. The only reason I pushed through to the last page was because I requested it, and I was so excited to read it because the word "linguists" is on the cover, and I've been starved for linguists and translators as main characters since "Arrival'. Well. Disappointment doesn't begin to cover it.

It's so upsettingly bad. Every single character sounds the same, with the forced slag, the forced pop-culture references, forced mentions of the terminology crafted for the game-within-the-book. The references really were jarring. This book came out a few weeks ago and it /already/ feels dated.

Then there's the matter of character introductions. Someone in another review mentioned it feels almost mocking of diversity in literature and for the rest of the time I was reading this I kept wondering if they were right. It was the same formula for everyone. "(Name) is (race), (pronouns), (general description of clothing or facial expression)'. And it lost its value pretty quickly since bar maybe two or three characters everyone is introduced as white.

Isobel is an annoying protagonist. And sure, a protagonist doesn't have to be likeable to be good. But she's just annoying. Everything about her - from her dialogue (though nearly every character speaks the exact same way) to her characteristics. She breaks her NDA within hours of signing one to a person online whom she doesn't even know outside of the game. She's an "excellet strategist" yet every plan she comes up with falls apart within two paragraphs. Her internal monologue is annoying and overflooded with meaningless references or lingo that /tried/ to appear like it was Hip and Cool With the Kids yet failed miserably.

The sapphic romance was the saving grace and the enemies-to-lovers progression felt fine pacing-wise, but their love confessions got brushed aside so easily, it felt like it held virtually no meaning to Isobel.

The plot was a convoluted mess. I just realised that I've completely forgotten the whole plot with the weird scientology-esque cult. It tried to do a million things at once. It's about the game, then it's about the power morphemes, then it's about the cult, then it's about the power morphemes again, then it's about the end of all things. I stopped keeping track of what was in the logoverse and what was in the real world because, frankly, I stopped caring early on.

The first chapter felt like maybe it could be fun and whimsical. It ended up a strangely juvenile mess that tries too hard to be funny and not enough to be a coherent story.

This is a stand-alone novel with material enough for six, leaping from rung to rung of an escalating plot like — well, like a video-game character parkouring her way through an auto-runner. By the halfway point, it had blown my mind twice and accumulated such cavalcades of incident that I couldn’t fathom where it had left to go — but it found places, and it went there. Hyperbole is Moore’s organizing principle, and puncturing it with granular mundanity is his applied mathematics; the result is an audacious, genre-bending whirlwind.

Really neat premise. Popular video game, with VR has taken the world by storm. One of the best players is recruited by the company who makes the game to work for them, where they are making "spells" with words from the game? This is where I got a little lost and a little bored...and didn't finish.

Tremenda decepción que me he llevado con este libro, que parecía que podía ser interesante pero ha resultado ser una mezcolanza que ni la mayonesa cortada, ingredientes que podrían dar lugar a un buen resultado pero que el autor no es capaz de conjugar debidamente.


La parte que más me interesaba a priori era el tema del uso de la lingüística, porque hay libros de ciencia ficción que han tratado este tema de forma muy atractiva, como Empotrados de Ian Watson o varios de los relatos de Conservation of Shadows de Yoon Ha Lee, por poner los primeros ejemplos que me vienen a la cabeza. Sin embargo. Scotto Moore, se saca de la manga los morfemas del poder y a partir de ahí ya todo se basa en la teoría de lo hizo un mago, sin orden ni concierto. Al principio del libro me acordé mucho de mi profesora de sexto mientras nos explicaba que el fonema era la imagen mental del sonido, para poder decirle que décadas después es la primera vez que me ha servido para algo esa definición en particular, pero no sé por dónde andará la señorita Capilla, así que lo mismo ni para eso me sirve.

El libro se sube a la tendencia LitRPG, con su propio mundo virtual en el que la protagonista es la reina por ser la mejor jugadora históricamente. Los creadores del juego Sparkle Dungeon utilizan esta plataforma para seleccionar a los mejores candidatos que puedan utilizar estos morfemas del poder (hola, Juego de Ender) y atraerlos a sus filas.

A partir de ahí la novela ya descarrilla sin control. Los malvados de opereta que aparecen buscan hacerse con el poder utilizando este lenguaje mágico, la amenaza de una destrucción alienígena completa solo sirve para que se enfrenten entre ellos a ver quién consigue más poder, la explicación de cuáles son los extraterrestres que llevan poblando la Tierra desde hace milenios es simplemente delirante y cada pocas páginas Moore se va sacando de la manga nuevos atributos y justificaciones para una trama insostenible. La trama tiene más agujeros que un queso Gruyere.

Pero es que la cosa no acaba ahí. También hay un culto que parece basado en la cienciología pero que adora un calamar gigante alien que desempeñará un papel fundamental en la trama, una estrella de la música que pertenece a ese culto pero en su tiempo libre se dedica a ser de los mejores jugadores del dichoso Sparkle Dungeon, un grupo de anarquistas que luchan contra el sistema de una forma, digamos, cuestionable… No se nos puede olvidar el multimillonario que forma parte de la cábala para controlar el mundo, o el cabecilla del culto que se cree la reencarnación de quién sabe qué enviado del dios-calamar. Sinceramente, la lista de incoherencias es interminable.

Nos encontramos ante una novela absolutamente prescindible.

Well this was quite a ride. I love humorous sci fi, and on that front this book totally delivers. Now, did I follow what was going on the whole time? No. Though I will say the author did an admirable effort trying to explain to me what exactly was going on. So thank you for that. There are so many ideas in this book and they're all super weird and fun and I enjoyed the book once I let go of "what's going on" and just enjoyed myself!

This book SHOULD be right up my alley, but I think this is case of a great idea that just wasn't executed to my particular taste. That being said, I can absolutely see how this would appeal to a very specific audience, and for that reason I will definitely keep it in mind as a recommendation for others!

Thanks to the pub and NetGalley for the review copy!

When I started this book I really didn't know what to expect but was excited to find out. I let myself fall into the a world where someone can with pride say they are Queen of the Sparkle Dungeon and follow them in a romping adventure where realisty bleeds into the logosphere and pocket universes.
Isobel Bailie has topped the leader board of the hit game Sparkle Dungeon for all four of its iterations and snagged all the best goodies including the title of Queen of the Sparkle Dungeon. The game is full on bling and centres on house music, mirrorballs, and all night raves with the Queen battling those who wish to thwart those persuing a good time.
Isobel is headhunted and lands her dream job working for the PR company who market Sparkle Dungeon and who are about to unleash SD5 on the world. Whilst there she discovers a talent for use of Power Morphenes - words broken down to their components and able to shape reality. This very firmly leads us down the rabbit hole where Isobel crosses into the game, can use elements of the game in reality, non player characters can come to life and as a side issue there is a monstorous thundercloud of doom sucking the joy and killing the universe - all of them.
Concepts and ideas come at you thick and fast which to be honest I may only fully absorb on a re-read, however there is irreverence to lighten the way and who wouldn't want glittersteel skin!
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for access to the ARC - all views are my own.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5

This is the kind of book that makes you go “what the heck did I just read” in the best way possible.

What if you could learn how to influence reality with power morphemes, extremely dense units of linguistic meaning? What if a virtual reality video game taught you how to do it? What if there was an existential threat coming inexorably closer to earth from a layer of existence just beyond the map in that video game? Would you join an evil cabal to try and stop it? These are all questions this book asks. And yes, it is as amazingly strange as it sounds.

I don’t really know how to talk about this book. There are sections that are entirely surreal and defy understanding (Can you really explain what it feels like to be teleported? Should it take multiple paragraphs?). And there are some quite dense sections that are needed to explain the use of power morphemes, which strangely make the magic system in this story seem entirely plausible (especially if you believe in the multiverse and aliens). But at the heart of this story is our main character Isobel and her growth from someone who can’t hold down a job to the literal queen of the universe (or something else equally absurd). I loved going on this journey with her and I loved the supporting cast of characters, “good guys” and “bad guys” alike. I also especially appreciated that the main character constantly double checks that she is using the proper pronouns for people in her narration, and that the queer characters are just living their lives and there is no angst around their identities.

This book is not going to be for everyone. It is very strange and as I mentioned there is some info-dumping required to explain the “magic” system. This is definitely more of a Sci-Fantasy story where you can’t think too hard about the plausibility of power morphemes and just accept that they are magic, magic created by aliens, but magic nonetheless. Also Isobel has a very distinct voice and she is very much a millennial so she may rub some people the wrong way.

THANK YOU NETGALLEY FOR THE FREE REVIEW COPY IN EXCHANGE FOR MY HONEST REVIEW.

I was all over the place with this book. I wanted to love it, as the idea of language-as-magic (let alone as entity) is right up my alley. And there were plenty of parts that I did genuinely adore, and the reveal about punctuation marks made me actually laugh so hard I couldn't breathe. But Moore's playwriting hand is all over this book and not in a good way: playwrights do a very different thing from novelists and Moore's attempt to bring his plays together into a coherent novel fail because the characters don't matter. They're early 00s video game characters, two dimensional and at the service of plot. And the plot, while rambunctious, gets tiresome after about 250 pages.

Dnf at page 100

I was quite excited to read Battle of the Linguist Mages. The idea of mages with magic that had its basis in linguistics that were to battle in a videogame sounded pretty good to me. Unfortunately a lot of the excecution didn't work for me at all.

Our mc is a big fan of the video game and with big fan I mean uber fan. Which is fine. We've all been there I'm sure. However after 100 pages I still didn't have a good feel for her personality or life beyond being an uber fan. She just felt like a vessel to tell this story than a character I was meant to like.

Adding onto that the ending of the first part left me very exasperated with how that piece of information was just dropped. I'm all for mixing fantasy and sc-fi together hence my excitement about the sound of this book. But that just wasn't going to work for me. I put the book down to regrab my thoughts and after a few days I realized I absolutely did not want to know how this sotry continued.

As a former English major and eternal sci-fi/fantasy lover, I was really excited about this book based on the description. Unfortunately, I felt that the characterization fell flat and that there was a lot more information provided than seemed necessary most of the time. An interesting premise, but fell short of the expectations I had for it.

Wow, this book is just indescribably weird and entertaining and beyond anything I thought it could be. The best way to describe it is to use a quote from the book itself, It is just filled to the brim and bursting with:

“Dazzling WTFness”

It is the perfect description for every inch of this story. From the worldbuilding to the plot and all its many twists, you are left with the dazzling feelings of "WTF" and "Holy Hell that’s good"-ness. The sarcasm and social commentary, drip from the page in the most eloquent ways. I often found myself laughing and sharing passages with my husband. This is defiantly a book for those of Left leaning politics. Parts read like a really well put together stand up set, detailed commentary with perfectly timed punch lines.

Isobel, the MC and narrator, is fantastic. She is utterly unlikeable in the best possible way and her droll sense of humour and razor sharp wit make the completely bizarre and complicated elements of this books plot and world building easily digestible. I like how integral she was to the worldbuilding. The story takes place in both a near future California and virtual world known as the Sparkle Realm, the hub world of the medieval house music based VR RPG/dungeon runner known as the Sparkle Dungeon franchise. Isobel has ruled all the leader boards for the game for almost a decade, she is cocky about that and I love how much of the game world we get to experience through her. It allows for the bizarre and the wonderful to happen without it really throwing you, the reader, out of the world. This is particularly well utilised when the boundary between the virtual and the real begin to blur.

The use of linguistics is also amazing! It is just such an inventive magic system. Many magic systems play with language (particularly Latin) but I have never read one that it constructed like this. This is a spoiler free review but I would never have predicted the twist and turns just this ‘magic system’ throws into the mix! The plot is the one thing that is indescribable without spoilers other than it will throw you through so many loops that you could end up dizzy. It takes so many sharp turns, gasp moments and moments where you just have to scream "WTF" that you just can’t put the book down. It is in a nutshell a Hero’s journey but it plays with the tropes and messes them up that they become unrecognisable at points. A lot of our side characters fill all those typical SFF/Gaming archetypes and then twist and shape them into something new. The story goes so far into the fantastical that you find yourself just swept along for the ride. I found myself marvelling at the inventiveness while also recognising so much of the commentary, shade thrown at the current world and love for all things geeky contained within this completely dizzying read.

This book is for you if you are a Gamer, a music lover, a language nerd, RPG player, SFF book fanatic, a rainbow spangled dreamer, its got a little bit for every kind geekdom for you to find your home. It is just an utterly unique and entertaining read from start to finish. Its going to be one of those reads that divides readers. Some will love it as much as me others will find it far too bizarre to continue but those that do embrace its completely Dazzling WTFness will have a rollercoaster ride.

I was provided an early galley of the novel by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

On the positive side, worldbuilding is key to a good science fiction/fantasy story. There is a LOT of worldbuilding in this story. The author clearly thought through many aspects, including elements of a fictional online computer game system. This will be very appealing to gamers; it might however turn off those that are not. While a gamer myself, I am not hardcore and the elements were a bit too hardcore for me. The threat to that also has to be high stakes and, again, the stakes here were as high as could be. For me, it was a bit so wide on the cosmic scale that it almost was hard to keep it in focus - when something goes that big you know how it's going to end. The bar for the drama is pretty high.

The problem for me is that to balance all the high stakes and cosmic threat and techno-jargon one needs to deliver a good human drama. It needs to balance. Sadly, for me, that did not occur. The characters for the most part came across as stereotypical cardboard cut-outs with very little depth. The protagonist came across as arrogant, all-knowing and could-do-no-wrong. In the days when I was deep into writing fanfiction, we would call this a "Mary Sue" character. I get that she is the star of the story, but everything just falls into place for her with very little payment on her part. I honestly just did not care.

I thought this book looked really fun and was excited to give it a try! The premise is so creative and the author did a great job writing in the main character's voice - it really sounded like someone telling you their story in their own unique way. Unfortunately, I had trouble actually understanding what was going on. I think the narrator's frenetic tone was a little confusing for explaining some complex topics. So while the book was entertaining, it wasn't what I was hoping it would be. Maybe I just wasn't the right reader for this one.

To start off with, I really wanted to like this book. I loved the very idea of the whole thing; linguistics, a dungeon crawler styled video game and a world where things aren't as they seem.

Only I didn't get that.

The book itself is so very slowly paced, with a lot of exposition and too reliant on the reader being able to connect with the MC. The MC who started off as potentially likeable, but as I read on I disconnected less and less, by the point that I just stopped reading this altogether.

I've noticed the some have compared this to Ready Player One, and as I haven't read that I cannot do a proper comparison. I have, however, seen Sword Art Online and this reminds me of that. Both of them I did not like, despite wanting to.

If this had been edited for a bit longer, and made shorter, then perhaps I may have enjoyed this more. The cover is absolutely fantastic, however.

1.5/5 stars (rounded to 2)