must it be? it must be.

A supreme pleasure in my life is having books delivered to me via UPS. It's materialistic, but I love to unwrap and hold my shiny new books close. :]

Anyway! Point being - I just got a new book last night, aaand I'm quite excited to read it. And I'm curious if anyone else has ever heard of it?

It's called The Maze Game, by Diana Reed Slattery.

Here is the synopsis, courtesy of Amazon.com:

The Maze Game, a science fiction novel, tells the story of a cult of mortal Death Dancers who, for 2000 years, have kept the immortal Lifers riveted with the brutal beauty of combat in a maze made of the visual language, Glide. The Dancer is pitted against an immortal Player, and, though the Dancer may win many times, the maze game always, eventually, ends in the spectacle of the Dance of Death. Now, the survival of the game itself is threatened. Dancemaster Wallenda and the four young Dancers of the Millennium Class battle Joreen, the drug lord plotting to regain control of the game. Wallenda is forced by Joreen to reveal the dark secrets of the maze game’s origin, at the risk of destroying his students’ commitment to Dance.

But the greatest force undermining the game is love. The young Dancer Daedelus must choose between the delicate T’Ling, willing to die for love, and the fiery MyrrhMyrrh, who would kill for it. The cyborg, Angle, struggles with the longing to replace his human flesh and the knowledge that cold chrome repels the warmth of human touch. As they train for and compete in the Millennium Games, each Dancer confronts the shifting faces of love and idealism, and comes to terms with the multiple meanings of the maze game, the Glide language, and the Dance of Death.

How fucking cool does that sound? 

And there's a whole website where you can play around with the Glide language or something (as seen in the entry title).

Diana Reed Slattery is a xenolinguist, so I assume this is related. I dunno, as cool as everything I've been reading sounds, I'm still a little confused because I'm a dummy. But I'm actually going to go jump into the book right now, so if it's as awesome as I am expecting, I may keep dreamwidth world updated.