296 pages
Published 2021
Read from April 15 to April 20
Rating: 2 out of 5
Browsing the library the other day, I found this on the shelf and was like: This is just Westworld, right? This is just D&D Westworld. A fantasy trope spin on an immersive animatronic theme park had, of course, been done at least as far back as Ray Aldridge’s “Steel Dogs” in 1989, and in a much weirder package than this could ever hope to match. Still, there are worse hooks than “D&D Westworld.”
It’s clear that this book rode the “cash in on D&D’s sudden popularity” wave that also gave us Astrid Knight’s Perception Check. Unfortunately, where Check was an isekai fantasy told with obvious love for its inspiration, Questland takes the technothriller / “amusement park gone out of control” route. I’m no longer that keen on the technothriller bandwidth of the sci-fi spectrum. It’s hard to discern if any love went into Questland, because its formula feels so… formulaic. Vaughn’s acknowledgments cite a deep personal history with TTRPGs, but none of that shows up on the page, aside from rote references to rolling for initiative and never splitting the party.
Questland’s own premise undermines its effect: by design, building a “biomechanical” sci-fi theme park out of fantasy tropes for a neo-feudal billionaire literally sucks the magic out of fantasy. The narrator will complain about how a sphinx should have a tangible smell in one paragraph, then gush about how she would happily take a lifelong pass to the park the next. She never coheres into an organic character; instead, she reads like the barfed up id of a ThinkGeek store circa 2017.
Worse, “eccentric tech guru with a private island” already has vastly different connotations than it did a mere five years ago, back when evil billionaire CEOs still had to pretend like they were interested in things like carbon sequestration. Billionaires have always been the bad guys, but nowadays? Having a Jobs / Musk figure in the John Hammond role is actively revolting. The narrative hints at the vileness of its CEO, mentioning his plan to reinstate feudalism in his private enclave, but it gets lost in our narrator’s continuing starry-eyed enchantment with Generic Nerd Tropes Island.
“I should never have come here to Mirabilis,” she muses. “But it was all worth it, to spend five minutes with a dragon.” This same character, of course, is also tempted to get back with her own shitty tech bro ex who’s been helping the billionaire CEO build Neo-Feudalism Island. It’s icky.
On its own merits, the book is… fine? I didn’t hate it, but I wouldn’t say I liked it, either. I’d much rather be reading another D&D isekai, like the much-delayed next book in Astrid Knight’s series. As it is, Questland felt like a half-hearted, rather repetitive clone of Jurassic Park, with a D20 thrown in.
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