Isobel is the Queen of the medieval rave-themed VR game Sparkle Dungeon. Her prowess in the game makes her an ideal candidate to learn the secrets of "power morphemes"—unnaturally dense units of meaning that warp perception when skillfully pronounced.

But Isobel’s reputation makes her the target of a strange resistance movement led by spellcasting anarchists, who may be the only thing stopping the cabal from toppling California over the edge of a terrible transformation, with forty million lives at stake.

Time is short for Isobel to level up and choose a side—because the cabal has attracted much bigger and weirder enemies than the anarchist resistance, emerging from dark and vicious dimensions of reality and heading straight for planet Earth!

“It reads like Snow Crash had a dance-off with Gideon the Ninth, in a world where language isn't a virus from outer space, it's a goddamn alien invasion.” —Charles Stross

“Sparklepunk meets Snow Crash! One of those books that hits you with an amazing new idea every couple of pages, and it makes for a wild ride.” —Django Wexler

"Moore takes readers on a roller coaster of weird in this wildly entertaining gonzo adventure.... Moore’s tale, adapted from several of his earlier plays, is audacious, ambitious, and metatextual, packed with such wild concepts as sentient punctuation marks, musical weapons, and multilayered reality. While the story sprawls at times, Moore never loses sight of his characters’ humanity or the underlying sense of adventure and humor. Readers will love it as much for the outlandish ideas as for the narrative complexity and sense of fun." - Publishers Weekly starred review

“A madcap adventure of magic and mayhem.... glitter-bombed popcorn fiction at its finest.” - Kirkus starred review

"The inventiveness and intensity of Moore’s storytelling perfectly blends Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Readers who enjoy gaming will find the novel accessible and appealing." - Library Journal

"Battle of the Linguist Mages is so fantastically inventive that many video-game fans and sf readers will fall hard for the linguistics-rooted magic and the shimmering adventurous universe of Sparkle Dungeon." - Booklist

"Battle of the Linguist Mages reads like Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler conceived a metaphorical child while high on LSD and blasting Skrillex in a basement." - BookPage

"By the halfway point, it had blown my mind twice and accumulated such cavalcades of incident that I couldn’t fathom where it had left to go — but it found places, and it went there. Hyperbole is Moore’s organizing principle, and puncturing it with granular mundanity is his applied mathematics; the result is an audacious, genre-bending whirlwind." - New York Times

"...a SFF riot of linguistic magic, as endearing as it is absurd." - Space Between Pages