Audiobook Review – Dream Park (Dream Park, Book 1) by Larry Niven, Steven Barnes, Narrated by Grover Gardner (3.5/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Science Fiction
Length: 13 hours and 34 minutes
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Release Date: November 07, 2017
ASIN : ‎B076X491H4
Stand Alone or Series: 1st book in the Dream Park series
Source: Audiobook from Audible.com
Rating: 3.5/5 stars

“A group of pretend adventurers suit up for a campaign called “The South Seas Treasure Game”. As in the early role-playing games, there are dungeon masters, warriors, magicians, and thieves. The difference? At Dream Park, a futuristic fantasy theme park full of holographic attractions and the latest in VR technology, they play in an artificial enclosure that has been enhanced with special effects, holograms, actors, and a clever story line. The players get as close as possible to truly living their adventure.

All’s fun and games until a park security guard is murdered, a valuable research property is stolen, and all evidence points to someone inside the game. The park’s head of security, Alex Griffin, joins the game to find the killer, but finds new meaning in the games he helps keep alive.”

Series Info/Source: This is the first book in the Dream Park series (there are four books in this series). I got this as an audiobook through Audible.

Audiobook Quality (4/5): The narration on this audiobook was fine. The narrator does a fine job with character voices and was decent to listen to. While I didn’t love this on audiobook, I thought it was fine.

Story (4/5): I enjoyed this quite a bit. I was surprised at how well this book has aged over the years. I enjoyed the fact that these characters are basically doing a complex LARP but there is a mystery from real life that wraps into their fantasy adventure. The story is well woven and kept me interested. The build up is a bit slow and the hopping back and forth between characters at the beginning is slightly hard to follow and feels a bit fractured, but does come together better as the story continues. Lastly, despite all the unique and fun trappings this is at its heart a straight-forward and fairly predictable who-dun-it type of mystery; which honestly is not my favorite type of story.

Characters (3/5): There are a lot of characters here and at times they are hard to keep track of. The sheer number of characters also makes them hard to relate to. I was a bit worried going in about a lack of strong female characters (given that this is an early 80’s book) but was pleasantly surprised to find the characters (female/male) were fairly well balanced. I was also surprised by the rather modern acceptance around different sexualities as well. You still do get some things that feel dated but it’s not too bad (women are called baby or sweetie and at points, women need to be saved and protected).

Setting (4/5): The Dream Park setting is an intriguing one. This is basically a futuristic theme park where people can join in on very realistic LARP adventures. These adventures involve a combination of LARP and holograms and other high tech manipulations. It’s a creative idea that is slowly coming to reality for gamers today. It was fun to see how close this is getting to current VR gaming, especially since it was written so long ago.

Writing Style (3/5): The writing here is okay. As I mentioned it starts out pretty rough and feels very fractured. A lot of language feels a bit dated and it has a more stark mid 80’s sci-fi writing style to it. The plot is fairly predictable and the fact that we have to follow so many characters throughout the story (and that a lot of them end up as fodder) was kind of a bummer. I am glad I finally read this and thought it was enjoyable but also have no desire to come back for more.

My Summary (3.5/5): Overall this was decent and I am glad I finally read it. Will I continue to read this series? Probably not. It was a fun listen but the world and characters didn’t draw me in enough for me to want to read more. I am also not a huge fan of straight-up who-dun-it murder mysteries. Also parts of this (language, societal thinking) feel a bit dated to me and I just didn’t really enjoy the writing style all that much.