Everything featured in the movies of Emperial, the largest of the Seven Metropolises, is real and is broadcast live on TV and on the Screens. Max Stranger never knows what might happen during his performance in the film.

Like the other Actors, he always has to put his mind to sleep so that the Film Coordinators can activate a whole new consciousness hidden in a special nanochip in his brain. It’s a consciousness of the Movie Character.

When Max starts to play the role with a dormant mind, Coordinators send thoughts to nanochip forcing the Character to do everything that the script requires.         

The worst begins when the ruthless Autarch approves a great production, a post-apocalyptic serial – Seven Players: Season 1 that will have its setting in a ravaged wilderness inhabited by mutated creatures. Max and his girlfriend, Lara, are chosen to play the starring roles. Death can lurk at every turn out there. Anyone can die. Even the leading actor…

Max is an actor in a world where actors are controlled by nano chips. They “sleep” through their performances and have no memory of them. But then Max’s “real life” girlfriend Lara joins the cast, the director decides that the actors should not be asleep during performances but make their own improvisational choices and only be guided by the nano chip. But then things go sideways as Max’s chip malfunctions and the fictional story becomes indistinguishable from reality.

This is an interesting premise but not really well executed though this may well be more the quality of the translation (copyright page shows this is translated from Polish) and the lack of simple editing than it is the quality of the writing. The story starts slowly, and confusingly, and I almost gave up on it but it eventually starts to make more sense and thus becomes more interesting. While the ending explains a lot of the disjointed action of the book and sets up a sequel I sincerely hope future instalments have a better translator and editor. ~~ Stephanie L Bannon