Blasphemy Online Volume 1: Dragon Hack

I loved this book!

Highly recommended. Deep characters and a realistic vision of the future.

This is the story of a young teenage boy struggling to cope with his life in a dystopian future and of that of a newborn dragon who has been orphaned and forced to fend for himself. They live in different worlds, but strange circumstances have them switch whenever the boy logs into a game.Personally, I loved the world building and character development of this book. While highly immature (no joke, we're talking teenage horniness and childlike selfishness here), both protagonists grow to become quite endearing, and this character growth is only expanded in the later two books.I noticed that a number of the other comments find the politics jarring. The way I see it, the dystopian future envisioned in this story is nothing more than a collection of bold caricatures from all sides. The boy protagonist happens to live in one dystopia while there are others (albeit maybe not so extreme) at its borders. In any case, the dystopian setting really only serves to create an environment that's both technologically advanced, but highly risky for the main character to act out in. More focus ought to be brought upon the accompanying fantasy world anyways.This is the first book of a prequel trilogy revolving around the world of Generica, which is a seperate but associated world to the dystopia discussed above. While this book works okay as a standalone story, if you are at all interested in the rest of the series, I *highly* suggest you read Threadbare (Vol.1-3) and Small Medium first, and in that order. While this book does a decent job at introducing the working LitRPG System of Generica, there is a lot of lore to unpack -- especially in the second/third books. The other two trilogies do a better job at easing the reader into this deep lore, and you will be left with questions that this trilogy will (mostly) answer.Most importantly, my suggestion to read the other two trilogies first stems from the fact that the third book of Blasphemy Online leaves behind a loose thread that's near-impossible to ignore, and is resolved in Threadbare Vol. 4-6. And obviously, it's hard to start Threadbare in the middle. I read this series without knowing it was a prequel, and this loose thread plagued me until I read the other books. Regardless, I've come to love this series. I just wished I knew I was in for the long haul before I started.TL;DR: This is a great trilogy, jampacked with lore. This is the prequel of a greater series, so highly recommend you read Threadbare (Vol.1-3) and Small Medium first before you start here.

I couldn't finish this one.It's a fantasy "LitRPG"/"GameLit" story about someone playing a video game. In this case the game, "Generica Online" (odd choice of name) is somehow connected to a real fantasy world. The hero uses it as escapism because his personal life is miserable and is beginning to sense that there's something seriously weird about it beyond his being assigned to an unheard-of playable dragon race. Decent setup. The game rules are unremarkable, with the story often interrupted by a notice that the hero has gained a point of Strength or something, common for the genre. The hero's kobold-like sidekick is likeable since he's trying to deal with the way the hero keeps switching between his real human personality and a more typical bratty dragon when the human is offline. Which starts to have some other effects on both worlds. The writing quality is all right except as noted, and the in-game plot interests me.What's the problem, then? First of all, I don't like these characters. Rutger, the hero, doesn't have anything going for him except that he's fairly bright as seen by his programming skill. He's an overweight adolescent boy whose only real ambition is to have sex. Plausible? Okay, but not hero material. Does his exposure to the fantasy stuff make him into one? Not really, beyond that he wants his mom back and starts begging powerful people to do that for him -- he does nothing himself. The hero's abusive father is consistently awful, his mother is absent, his friends are just like him, and all the authority figures are horrible or at least complicit. I do like the sidekick and there's an unseen teacher who's okay. So I felt like I wasn't rooting for these guys and that the hero wasn't actively making an effort to improve his real-life situation. The real-world parts of the story are depressing but don't seem to go anywhere under the hero's control, so why are they there except to set up the game? His in-game adventures give him very few choices too, so that he's mostly funneled along a cave network. Ironically the hero, given a chance to talk about his goals, said he wanted "power" without any specific ideas. He still hasn't got any, two thirds of the way through.At the start of the book there's a disclaimer that the author is not trying to write about real religion or specific real people. But it sure seems like a heavy-handed political tract at points. Early on we see how the hero's home (apparently some part of the current US) is under an oppressive hyper-Christian government called the Ministry. It's racist, it sends straying women to "concentration camps", it's full of propaganda and censorship, it bans travel, it's corrupt, etc. At about 20% in the abusive dad screeches about "libtard cucks" and "fake news", like a real liberal's stereotype of a real conservative. At this point (it wasn't the first such irritation) I put the book down, but someone cajoled me into pressing on. I got to 65%, a part with some Internet trolls. One's a horrible neo-Nazi saying the kind of things you'd expect, and then he complains about being oppressed by the "socialists" who are the Ministry's bogeyman, threatens to molest the underage male hero (second time that's been discussed)... and then says "Make Generica great again".I don't greatly care about the personal beliefs of the author. Here though, they're leaking through in an inappropriate way that comes off as a strawman insult to half the readers. He lost me at this point. There was no need for this; it could have been a more generic dystopian state (eg. Hunger Games' Panem) and would have supported this story just as well. Assuming the same basic setup of an oppressive government and unhappy family life, I would have preferred to read something focused on the fantasy adventure, instead of being pulled out of it repeatedly to be shown this kind of thing.

The media could not be loaded.  This is another story set in the Threadbare Universe, but told from the perspective of the players. So in a lot of ways it feels totally different than that series. You will recognize the game elements if you’ve read that series but if not, this does a good job of explaining things.The story is also much darker than anything I’ve read from the author, especially the dystopian real life part. It’s so harsh that the author has several disclaimers that he’s not poking fun at any real religion or group. It’s also a bit more of slow burn with a lot of character development in the firs part of the novel, but the main character (MC) is in the game world by the 11% mark.Once in the game world, the system will feel familiar to anyone that’s read the Threadbare or Small Medium series. It actually expands on many RPG elements giving you more notifications, class and race abilities, and player only aspects that you wouldn’t have seen before. It’s all very nicely thought out and is explained very naturally.There are several aspects to the story and how the MC explores the game world while it seemingly explores him that I enjoyed. I won’t spoil things, but it’s a neat exploration. The in-game time is a bit slice of life, but always relates back to the dark real world.Overall, I liked the novel. It’s a bit different and darker than what the other’s written before and some people will find elements of dystopian real world a little controversial. But it’s an entertaining read.Score: 7.5 out of 10