Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde - Sort of a sci-fi "Groundhog Day" for kids

In the virtual reality game Heir Apparent, there are way too many ways to get killed--and Giannine seems to be finding them all. Which is a darn shame, because unless she can get the magic ring, locate the stolen treasure, answer the dwarfs dumb riddles, impress the head-chopping statue, charm the army of ghosts, fend off the barbarians, and defeat the man-eating dragon, shell never win.

And she has to, because losing means shell die--for real this time.

Sort of a sci-fi "Groundhog Day" for kids
The strangest thing about "Heir Apparent" is that it makes no mention of the events in "User Unfriendly," Vande Velde's 1991 novel about a game from the same fictional company. Furthermore, the front, inside, and back cover don't mention the older book at all. Vande Velde writes on her website that she does not consider "Heir Apparent" a sequel, just a story taking place in the same universe. I have a different theory. I think she was trying to do "User Unfriendly" over again, but better.

If so, she has succeeded. It's a much better book--funnier, more exciting, better crafted. "User Unfriendly" featured over a half dozen characters, none of them fleshed out. Vande Velde seemed more interested in the details of her game. But it wasn't even that interesting a game: it lacked the feel of the computer role-playing adventures it imitated, where players use a mixture of creativity and logic to win. Most of the time, the kids seemed to be winging it, and their successes felt arbitrary.

One important difference Vande Velde makes to "Heir Apparent" is to focus on one character, Giannine, who enters the game alone; all the other characters are computer-generated. (Giannine was one of the players in "User Unfriendly," but we learned so little about her that the girl we meet here might as well be a brand-new character.) Another difference is that we get to see a little of the world these kids live in when they remove their VR helmets. On her way to the arcade, Giannine encounters a robotic bus driver and a tiny, genetically engineered dragon. But the setting can't be too far in the future, for we also see conventional email.

The premise is that Giannine receives a $50 gift certificate to play a VR game of her choice. (By the time all this advanced technology exists, wouldn't fifty bucks be pocket change? Never mind.) The game she chooses, "Heir Apparent," starts on a sheep farm, where she is informed that she is the illegitimate child of the recently deceased king, who pronounced her heir to the throne, passing over three legitimate sons. Her objective is merely to survive the three days (which will only last thirty minutes in the real world) before her coronation. But if her character dies, she must start over from the beginning. That's practically asking for trouble.

The trouble comes in the form of an activist group called Citizens to Protect Our Children, or CPOC (pronounced "sea pock"), who break into the arcade and sabotage the equipment. The company's founder sends Giannine a message that she cannot exit the game prematurely without risking brain damage, but she cannot stay in the game for too long without risking fatal "overload." All she has to do is win the game--and avoid getting killed too many times.

Easier said than done. There is no one correct strategy for completing the game; it's all left up to the individual player. But many obstacles lie in her path, among them that it seems like almost every character is plotting to kill her. As soon as she reaches the castle, indeed, the widowed queen orders one of her sons to kill Giannine right there. The queen understandably loathes the offspring of her late husband's fling, but her three sons are sneakier, their motivations harder to discern, and ominous questions surround the circumstances of the kings's death as well as the fling itself. These questions are kept in the background, hinting at a back story of greater complexity than you'd expect in a computer game.

Every time Giannine loses a life, she finds herself back on the sheep farm, where she has to do the whole game over again. This aspect of the novel has an intriguing "Groundhog Day" vibe to it, as she meets the same characters in a host of different situations that change depending on all the little choices she makes.

There is, for example, a boy caught by guards who claim he stole a deer. The evidence is lacking, and Giannine has no desire to sanction the boy's execution, even though he is only computer-generated. But if she simply frees him, more problems will occur.

The computer-generated characters all have personalities and seem able to carry on nuanced, naturalistic conversations to a degree that no modern computer, as far as I know, has ever achieved. They can detect sarcasm, laugh at jokes, and pick up subtle cues in body language. One of Giannine's tasks is to win over their loyalties, despite their treachery, and in the process she gains considerable skill in diplomacy and teamwork.

One way or another, I enjoyed the book much more than "User Unfriendly." The game is still not much like the computer adventures I know. It's ten times better! And maybe that's the real point of books like these, to depict games we wish we could play, but which exist only in the author's wildest imagination.

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