Monday, January 31, 2022

Scotto Moore's "Battle of the Linguist Mages"

Scotto Moore is the author of Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You, a sci-fi/horror novella published by Tor.com. For fourteen years, he was an active playwright in Seattle, with major productions nearly every year during that time, and 45 short plays produced during that time as well. He wrote book, lyrics, and music for the a cappella sci-fi musical Silhouette, which won the 2018 Gregory Falls Award for Outstanding New Play, presented by Theatre Puget Sound. He also wrote, directed and produced three seasons of the sci-fi/comedy web series The Coffee Table; and wrote and starred in the horror/comedy play H.P. Lovecraft Stand-up Comedian!

Here Moore dreamcasts an adaptation his debut novel, Battle of the Linguist Mages:
My main character is Isobel, a young gamer who for years has held the title of Queen of Sparkle Dungeon, which is a medieval rave-themed VR MMORG. She’s brash and cocky, and also pretty hilarious, but if you’re in her raiding party she always tries to have your back. Her life out in the “mundane world” of work and relationships is a mess when we meet her, but she starts to put herself back together as the story gets going, and then she realizes there’s more to the game by far than she understood.

When I first saw the prompt here, without even trying to come up with a list, the first name that popped into mind almost immediately was Miley Cyrus. The persona she uses as a rock star, combined with the chops she has as an actress, would be a great foundation for a memorable performance as Isobel. She has a counterpart eventually, a genius computational linguist / underground resistance leader, and I would try to get Zoë Kravitz for that.

They’re each pitted against a cabal of technologists, gurus, ad executives – bad people, all of them – and while I won’t go into detail about each of them, imagine a villainous cadre comprised of James Spader, Cate Blanchett, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tilda Swinton, and Anthony Hopkins. (Dreamcasting!) From their perspective, they’re trying to save the world from something much more dangerous than they are, but they can’t stop maneuvering and playing power games even with so many lives at stake.
Visit Scotto Moore's website.

--Marshal Zeringue