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Slum Online Kindle Edition

by Hiroshi Sakurazaka (Author), Joseph Reeder (Translator)

15 customer reviews

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CTRL + ALT + DEL YOUR LIFE

Etsuro Sakagami is a college freshman who simply drifts through life, but when he logs on to the combat MMO Versus Town, he becomes Tetsuo, a karate champ on his way to becoming the most powerful martial artist around. While his relationship with new classmate Fumiko goes nowhere, Etsuro spends his days and nights online in search of the invincible Ganker Jack. Drifting between the virtual and the real, will Etsuro ever be ready to face his most formidable opponent?

“...depicts a way of life that is both science-fictional and increasingly common, with a main character who spends more time in his virtual life than his real life, and who has sufficient emotional investment in both worlds to blur the line between them.”—Locus Magazine

“[Slum Online] excels in conveying the virtue of humble accomplishment, of proving to yourself that you’re the best, even if the public isn’t necessarily aware of it.” —World SF Blog

“Online slummer Etsuro’s quest to find and defeat ‘Ganker Jack’ is exhilarating, but his parallel search for love and purpose (and a blue cat) in Real Life is just as affecting. Intriguing, thought-provoking, and unexpectedly action-packed!”—Jeff Somers, author of The Electric Church

About the author:
Hiroshi Sakurazaka was born in 1970. After a career in information technology, he published his first novel Wizards' Web in 2003. His 2004 short story "Saitama Chainsaw Massacre" won the 16th SF Magazine Reader's Award. His other novels include Characters (co-written with Hiroki Azuma) and All You Need Is KILL, which was released by Haikasoru in 2009.

Length: 210 pages

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Product Details

File Size: 396 KB
Print Length: 210 pages
Publisher: Haikasoru/VIZ Media (October 1, 2010)
Publication Date: October 1, 2010
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Language: English
ASIN: B0045JLPZG
Text-to-Speech: Enabled

X-Ray:

Not Enabled

Word Wise: Not Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Not Enabled

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #271,751 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #11258 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction
- #18512 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

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Customer Reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars

5 star		20%
4 star		53%
3 star		20%
2 star		7%
1 star		0%

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

The Hustler Online

By Timothy Riley on May 12, 2010

Format: Paperback Verified Purchase

Slum Online is an interesting novel, in that it's an idea I'm surprised hasn't been done before. The concept of a great quest inside a video game being the main focus of the story while reality plays out in a more mundane way around it, you would think with the rise in popularity of video games in the last decade that this would be the sort of story more people would have come up with.

That said, the novel is interesting in that it's actually rather deeper than the plot description lets on. The classic movie buffs reading the novel will instantly catch all the references to the 1961 classic "The Hustler" staring Paul Newman. If you haven not seen the movie, then you'll actually be missing out on some of the nicer details in the novel. They draw so many parallels between our protagonist's quest to find the infamous Ganker Jack and Fast Eddie's desire to beat Minnesota Fats that they flat out mention the movie on a few occasions. Comparing the two stories is part of the fun of the novel.

The book was a nice short read. Entertaining, but with many faults. While the story was deeper than I was expecting, some chapters seem to end rather abruptly and then suddenly two weeks of time will pass in-between the chapters. Also the constant use of "FX" as describing sounds in the real world got annoying. I understand that it was supposed to show how the main character felt more at home in the video game world, but it still was overdone.

For the American release there's a bonus short story after the novel, from the point of view of a side character. It's a nice little addition, and to be honest, in some ways it's better than the actual novel. It flows slightly better and ends on an interesting note that makes the reader consider how the story will truly end.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

A Fantastic "Slice of Life" Read

By John Ostermiller on June 22, 2010

Format: Paperback

After reading Yukikaze by Chohei Kambayashi I was both leery of and intrigued by the thought of reading another translated novel from Japan. Leery because Kambayashi, in my opinion, wasted some very intriguing ideas by falling back on trite stereotypes and unexplained "weirdness" as opposed to substance in his episodic military sci-fi novel. I was intrigued, however, because the same author had introduced us to a interesting setting - a world of hyperspace corridors leading from Antartica to another planet populated by an alien military force and resting upon the shoulders of the burgeoning artificial intelligence in an experimental combat plane.

While Slum Online does not reach as ambitiously for the stars in terms of setting, it instead succeeds far more then Yukikaze does in introducing an evoking a simple story of a young man searching for himself in an online game set against the backdrop of "mundane" city life in Tokyo. Hiroshi Sakurazaka's main character is similar on the surface to the protagonist to Rei Fukai in the sense that both are dysfunctional sort of "losers". But the difference is that Hiroshi's main character is much more likable then Fukai. Etsuro of Slum Online struggles to be the best fighter in the online game "Versus Town", while searching for a mysterious martial artist known as Ganker Jack, who is gunning for the venerable "Top Four" fighters of the game community. In the real world, Etsuro struggles in developing a relationship with a girl named Fumiko who has taken an interest in him and who has a quest of her own - to find the mysterious "Blue Cat" rumored to be seen around Tokyo's Shinjuku District.Read more ›

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

Three out of Five stars!

By Michael Loring on July 31, 2014

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

Slum Online by Author Hiroshi Sakurazaka is a standalone novel depicting the life of Etsuro Sakagami - a young man obsessed with becoming the best gamer in the MMO Versus Town.

Etsuro is a normal young college student. He spends his days (sometimes) attending his classes, commuting on the train through the bustling streets of Japan, and his nights as Tetsuo - the karate master with the ambition of being the absolute best in Versus Town. When a new, mysterious player named "Ganker Jack" comes to the game and starts defeating the strongest players, Etsuro sets his character Tetsuo after him in an attempt to beat the one who beat the best. All the while dealing with a new female classmate that he may or may not like.

I had very high hopes for this novel. I am a huge fan of the author's other novel, All You Need is Kill, so when I discovered he had written a novel about gamers I was excited to begin reading it.

Unfortunately, I find myself a little disappointed. The writing was terrific, especially considering it's been translated from Japanese, but the main character was stoic throughout most of the novel and very hard to relate to. Etsuro is a very intelligent character, but squanders his intellect by morosely speculating on the world around him and, for the most part, ignoring the prospect of an actual human connection with his classmate who very clearly likes him until the end when he felt he was done playing his game. I felt the novel would be infinitely better if Etsuro had been someone who could actually emote.

It's very rare to find a novel that paints gamers in a good light, which Slum Online does pretty well, but also very hard to find one that also creates interesting characters that capture the affection of the reader.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

Read it

These are my twenty words more or less

These are my twenty words high or low

These are my twenty words shiny or dull

These are my twenty words big... Read more

Published 21 days ago by danco

Five Stars

Really enjoyed this book

Published 10 months ago by Chuan Lin

Three Stars

Pretty good story. Writing style a little rough and I wish there was more story

Published 12 months ago by Iain C.

Entertaining

This was recommended to me by a friend who games a lot, and I did enjoy the book. It's got a unique style to the way things are portrayed in the virtual realm, and the main... Read more

Published 16 months ago by YHJ

Not for me

I couldn't really get into this book. It follows a college student, who likes playing an online fighting game. He just didn't do very much. Read more

Published 17 months ago by Simon Cantan

A very nice look at a gamer's head

Good book. All of the characters follow the mindset of so e time of gamer, their feelings and motivations, and without making it look like a problem or aspiration. It just is. Read more

Published on May 1, 2013 by Kevin Smith

Falls into some typical traps

I want to rate this higher, because there are few books that deal directly with the online and virtual behaviour in any real way. However this is simply not that book. Read more

Published on December 17, 2012 by G. S. Kelly

New Fav Author

Not as good as "All You Need Is Kill" but amazing nonetheless. Hiroshi Sakurazaka has definitely become one of my favorite author's and I'll be waiting to see what else comes out... Read more

Published on November 14, 2012 by Nicole Hellene

If you think your children play on the computer too much...

This might be an excellent book to pass on to a child that seems lost in online gaming. That's the whole plot, in a nutshell: Etsuro Sakagami is a college freshman busy failing at... Read more

Published on January 3, 2011 by N. Helfinstine

The Cover Lies So Much

I don't know what is up with this cover lol. It clearly expresses the concept of a scene more than anything that happens in the book. It's got the entire scene all wrong! Read more

Published on November 23, 2010 by Amazon Customer

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