How does this forum not have a thread on Worm, a web serial by John McCrae (under the alias Wildbow)? You can even read it for free, just by clicking that link!
It’s to my mind the best superhero fiction ever (maybe best superhero entertainment of any sort). I got into it after a friend described it roughly as “it’s about superheroes who use their powers in a mostly intelligent and often surprising manner”. This was vague enough to spoil nothing and specific enough to make me have a look. And it was indeed accurate.
The setup is that a few decades ago people started gaining superpowers due to unknown reasons. The world also started really going for the crapper for various reasons.
The protagonist of the story, a teenage girl, has recently gained powers. Except she didn’t exactly win the superpower lottery: she can control bugs. But hey, a crappy superpower is still a superpower, and she’s going to be a superhero no matter what! There’s just a few things that need to be taken care of first…
It would be so easy, so easy to just go Carrie on the school.
There’s a couple of things that make this book special in my mind. One is the word-building (and yes, the review thread about Deadhouse Gates is what jolted me into starting this thread). The wide array of superpowers and the way they interoperate, the heroes and villains, the organizational dysfunction of super-bureaucracies, etc. It all just fits in together logically while feeling fresh and inventive.
The second is the format. This was published three chapters a week, with no breaks, over the course of two years. How do you keep people returning for the next installment for two years? By a total mastery of compelling cliffhangers. It’s a little bit like reading good Dumas; somehow no matter how many things get resolved by the end of the chapter, there is something you absolutely need to know and that’ll obviously be revealed in the next one.
This art of the cliffhanger was probably a necessity when this was published as a serial; it’s downright dangerous when reading the complete work. While on my first read-through of Worm, for a couple of weeks I was only getting a few hours of sleep every night and then shambling to work like a sleep-deprived zombie.
This was not an isolated incident. Of the half dozen people I recommended Worm to (and the friend who originally told me about it), all but one ended up with a similarly unhealthy short-term obsession. There’s something special there.
This isn’t to say that this is some kind of a flawless work. It’s 1.6M words written by one guy who was also working full-time on some kind of menial job at the same time. It has not been professionally edited. Hell, it hasn’t even been unprofessionally edited. That shows. A good editor would probably be able to cut this by 25%, while also fixing a bunch of verbal ticks that eventually get annoying.
But you know what? When reading Worm, I just didn’t care at all that the writing was rough.
