Gahhhh part of me wants to grab this tonight and part of me wants to wait on the library just out of spite for the way it was split. Your post has increased the odds that I give in roughly right after dinner.
I am going to start on this tonight. Well, the pair.
Yeah, I finished Battle Grounds, it’s really an entire book of boss fight, fan service at the highest level. Couple of big things happen in the meta, too.
Same here. In retrospect it’s even more ridiculous that it was released as two books, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy reading it.
Somewhere, sometime, some random person is going to grab this random book from the library because they’re the kind of person who doesn’t mind jumping in the middle of a series… and be super, super confused about 0% introduction, 0% buildup, 95% climax, and 5% aftermath.
Devolution, by Max Barry (EDIT: Brooks, d’oh!)
Ebook, library
Sep 15 - October 2nd, 2020
Same author as the zombie survival guide and world war z, and oh boy, he is not a very good writer. It’s an epistolary novel, supposedly the discovered writings of a person who survived a Sasquatch massacre, and the way he uses the form makes it suffer, heavily, in believability. He adds so much detail that it becomes ridiculous that you’re reading a journal, spoiling any of the ‘found drama’ idea. When I was a kid I loved the ‘is this real?’ framing Crichton put on Jurassic Park and some others, but in this novel that goes right out the window. He also has numerous interstitials with experts and friends, and they read like attempts to amplify the drama. I skimmed the final 70 pages of it.
Barry’s real skills lie in scenario design and he’s got a really good setup here. It’s an isolated group of high-tech cabins, and it lets him comment on tech bro invincibility, lack of disaster preparedness, lack of connection to the actual world we live in, and a lot of other associated things. that stuff is quite well done. I think he’d be an excellent dungeons and dragons module designer.
Best part: It got me back into disaster preparedness!
How long has he been going by Barry?
I was wondering that too. Had to go back and look at the other books to make sure I wasn’t misremembering.
I thought that WWZ was a great book. Sorry to hear about the new one. Maybe he’s a one book wonder?
Max Barry is the Australian author of Lexcon and Providence. Max Brooks is the American author of WWZ and Devolution (and son of Mel Brooks.) I listened to the audiobook for Devolution, which is a full cast production with a decent cast. It was well acted but, you know, fine. Sasquatch just isn’t really a compelling monster, I guess.
WWZ was all right; I didn’t love it. And no, he’s not actually any good at the craft of writing. That much was painfully obvious in WWZ.
I had a similar reaction to Devolution. WWZ was so much fun & the pseudo-historical framing was great there, but it’s just terrible here. I do think that it’s much-compounded by the fact that the sasquatch are just plain uninteresting as the monsters and that the human characters are all so deeply unlikeable. BUT in (some) fairness it IS worth pointing out that there’s a purpose to the humans being unlikeable – which is that we are the real monsters in the novel.
But all of this doesn’t ultimately excuse the book’s being boring & poorly written.
Diego
Well unlike @DoomMunky who I think may be misremembering who Max Barry is, I did just finish Jennifer Government and it’s a weird but chaotic novel - and it’s by Max Barry.
Weird in that it happens in a fucked up future where corporations basically run everything to the point where your last name is who you work for. John Nike, Buy Mitsui, Jennifer Government et al.
Chaotic in that it has all these threads of different things throughout the book where everyone’s stories are intersecting and it comes to a somewhat disjointed and non-fulfilling end at least for me, YMMV.
It was still good writing, but the world building was so fucking weird, I don’t think I ever got over it.
I don’t know if I’m going to make it through Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. I absolutely adored the first of hers that I read, Uprooted, but this one is a freaking brick.
Same idea – weaving elements of the stories she grew up hearing from her Central (Eastern?) European Jewish grandmother into novels that have a wonderfully unique flavor compared to rank-and-file Western fantasy. But man, this one is much slower going. Lots of dark-age-peasantry misery porn.
Of Max Barry, I’ve only read Syrup. Kind of sad that its view of product marketing is barely satirical this point. There have even been products not too different from the black cans of “Fuk” soda.
Also I enjoy saying “I’ll have four giant tortellinis” repeatedly to annoy my wife at restaurants (not actually ordering this!) No idea why that stuck with me.
They would be called tortelloni.
I am a fool. Of course I meant Devolution by Max BROOKS. It is a good scenario, just like WWZ. He should stick to D&D sourcebooks (like Zombie Survival Guide).
Max Barry is the author of the truly amazing Lexicon, and the interesting and uneven Machine Man, the aforementioned Jennifer Government, and the interesting but forgettable recent Providence, which I just read in August 2020.
This is a funny one. It’s a lot more spare than Lexicon, feels in tone a lot like Machine Man. You get a pretty detailed picture of each of the characters lives and actions has a move around on the ship, and the gradual reveal of their real relationship to the war effort is pretty great. The ship as a somehow truly alien force is also pretty neat, though I wish there’d been a bit more inexplicable behavior on its part.
The way the characters collapse at the end into extermination machines feels disappointing in the moment, but makes sense in the tone and theme of the novel; little people are captured by these big ideas, captured by the needs of war, by these big unchangeable movements in society, that seems to dictate their actions more than individual morality or choice. Maybe that’s just true of the way that Gilly ends up killing the nurse salamander, the way he suddenly stops seeing it as an entity and decides to destroy it.
Emotionally I don’t feel that strongly about it, which I think is influenced by the flatness of its overall tone and affect. I recommend it, particularly as a very lightly crunchy character piece with a good plot, but it’s not rousing, or emotional, or even particularly dramatic feeling as it all unfolds. But he’s a good writer, so it’s hard to stop reading.
Agree with this on all counts. I liked Providence and was constantly taken off-guard by how much a character study it is with the sci-fi stuff mostly as backdrop. The secret lives of the characters and their emotional vulnerabilities are really the main stage. But it’s kind of a trifle. Lexicon is a trifle too, but is insanely addictive to read.
Your avatar looks like a giant meatball.
Want to see how it tastes?