The End of Everything - NOT a review

The week before Empty Space was published I reread Light and Nova Swing. What followed was two weeks of the most hallucinatory, vivid dreaming I've ever experienced. Harrison's prose contains worlds, not just in paragraphs but in sentences. Voice and discourse clash in a discordant epiphanic yearning for meaning, even as the prose seduces you in it's dreamy embrace. Worlds, realities and artefacts protrude, stack or curve around each other: breaking through, seeping out, vacuumed back in.

I lay down sleepily to reread parts and see what would emerge from that half dreaming place - no drugs required. “What are you doing down there” (10) was answered not by this but this.*

!?

*Really! The melody, familiar as a 70s morning with Terry Wogan. I had to look up the words. I'm NOT a Supertramp fan, though I grew up with it, omnipresent, on the radio. 

Dungeon Crawler Carl -- or, Just play Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (again)

 

Dungeon Crawler Carl is on the Clarke shortlist. I managed to find a (very) cheap copy.

  I feel like any way I approach this it's going to appear as a pose, as though I'm putting on a rhetorical costume - or a more obvious one than usual! 

  Is there any point producing an outraged or even a serious book review? It would be like criticising Coronation Street for being formulaic and melodramatic.  Dinneman's novel is already incredibly popular, with seven sequels, a possible TV adaptation, a tabletop RPG in the works and more. It's a phenomenon. So, what to do? 

   I didn't get a computer until I was 29 though I had used university PCs for research and writing some of my essays before, in the mid 90s: I've been trying to remember the mid 90s and I think I WROTE most of my essays!? But yes, in the early months of 2001 I moved to London to be with my partner and begin my nursing degree. Somehow, I really don't remember how, or even quite why, I started playing games, RPGs to be exact. The answer is probably in my childhood. At 12 or 13 I got my hands on some of the Fighting Fantasy books. I was probably slightly too old for them but for a boy who loved all things SF and fantasy on TV and film, they fulfilled a need similar to the one the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon (1983-85) satisfied. I was mainly reading Agatha Christie and Stephen King at this point and dealing with all kinds of nonsense that a child shouldn't have to. 

 

   A bit later, maybe I was 15 or even 16, I discovered the Dragonlance Chronicles, David Eddings and others. If someone had asked me, I'm not sure I could have told them who Tolkien was, though I wasn't totally clueless because I had read A Wizard of Earthsea (I was). 

   I think I can describe all of that as a kind of yearning - for monsters, old fashioned adventure, for simple childhood pleasures, a nerdiness that couldn't find expression elsewhere. As you can see I find it, still, mildly embarrassing. I shouldn't, my fifteen years as a school librarian showed me how even the most advanced readers - 14 year olds I was feeding Middlemarch and Bruno Schultz - still chersished YA books and childhood favourites. 

  But yes, over a decade later I would discover the similar pleasures of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale on our PC. The pleasure of levelling up and finding magical gear and weapons has NEVER left me.  I've played many more RPGs and action RPGs since - especially the FromSoftware games and the Nioh games - but when Baldur's Gate 3 came out in 2023 I thought Christmas had finally arrived AND it was finally worth celebrating. 

   I tell you all this because I didn't hate Dungeon Crawler Carl at all. There are things to dislike about it certainly but before I got bored (it IS repetitive) - maybe two thirds in - I was mildly entertained. I had smirked a few times. Most of all I enjoyed finding out the creative details of Carl and Donut's new magical items. Feel free to judge me. If you don't know the plot... aliens level Earth leaving about 14 million people left alive. Those remaining humans then have to fight it out, for the viewing pleasure of (mainly evil) aliens across the galaxy in a kind of Deathtrap Dungeon. Their advanced technology is such that their AI runs it like a game - an RPG where the survivors literally level up, getting stronger, gaining new abilities and equipment. The novel follows Carl and his partner's cat Donut as they try to survive.

   Apparently the book is an example of LitRPG, a new(ish) sub-genre of speculative fiction. It's not hard to understand the appeal or the popularity - games, (quickly fact-checking a handful of articles) generate double the revenue of movies and music combined. Go on YouTube and you'll find that millions of people watch walkthrough videos for entertainment, not just to help them through a game. Think of cosplay and fan-fiction too. I could bemoan the omnipresence of formulaic, derivative products throughout the cultural landscape but at this stage what is the point? And honestly I doubt whether people wondering about its place on the Clarke are really wanting to spoil anybody's pleasure. It's inclusion raises (all the old, familiar) questions about what a book prize shortlist should be for: whether such a list, that purports to show off the best of something, has a responsibility(?), a burden of trust(?) to choose books that give readers the opportunity to experience wonder and ingenuity, to engage with wisdom and wit. But I've written about this before.    

   Dungeon Crawler Carl aims for a kind of laddish, boorish Hollywood charm. Carl is a tall, relatively well-built hero: you can imagine it as a mid career Bruce Willis vehicle (rather than one for Arnold). The novel wants to show off its progressive credentials by poking fun at Carl's masculinity: Donut lets it slip that Bea, Carl's partner, was sleeping around, there's a small dick joke too and the book often derives humour from Carl's lack of trousers. Low hanging fruit you might say. But these little ironic subversions just act to reinforce Carl's masculinity, especially when most of his power, enhanced through levels and equipment, are his fists. The other way the novel wants to remind you of its heart, and it's smarts, is by showing us that Carl despises the violence he is required to mete out. This is often delivered with a gamer's knowingness. Even in a game as celebrated for it's choices and characterisation as Baldur's Gate 3, it still has a community of goblins that many of us will slaughter for experience. Carl and Donut encounter and murder similar villains throughout with goblins the first, just so you can't miss the joke. Furthermore Carl is usually the smartest and the most moral in the room, forever muttering that he won't be broken whatever he is forced to do. It's incredibly simple stuff. You begin to wonder how a similar plot with different types of characters could turn out: how it might be possible to mess with stereotypes, to produce something more thought provoking, even in its own (gaming) terms, whilst retaining the humour and irony. 

   With that said the biggest villains, along with (alien) capitalist class, are two ICE agents, so fair play. And I appreciate that lots of readers will love Donut.

 The worst of the novel reminds me of playing a police side at five-a-side football (MANY years ago). You kind of knew what was coming - either someone would take a mardy swipe at you or they'd try to wind you up by intimating that they'd slept with your sister the previous night. As someone who thinks Frankenhooker is a work of sleazy genius, I have a high threshold for distasteful jokes but here you keep finding an obnoxious level of frat boy sexist nastiness:

"Goblin Shamans are the leader class of all goblin clans, second only to the War Chieftain or, more rarely, the Goblin Warlord. They are without humor and are said, as part of their training, to have to pick two of the following three actions in order to graduate Shamanka University: they have to fuck, cook, and/or eat their own parents. Most don’t pick cook." (126)

Or: 

"If you hear banjo music, run. Clurichauns are distant, hillbilly relatives of the Leprechauns. And while the Leprechauns are said to guard vast piles of gold, the only thing Clurichauns might hoard are Polaroids of their own sisters sitting on the can and questionable business schemes. This particular sect is of the unvaccinated variety. Don’t let them sneeze on you." (260)

Or:

The stubborn and hot-headed Mongoliensis is not the type of pet to ever be “tamed.” The best one can hope for is mutual respect. And even then they still might try to eat you if the fancy strikes them. While especially powerful, fast, and vicious when they are fully grown at level 15, getting them to level 15 is about as likely as a cheerleader from West Virginia reaching her 18th birthday as a virgin." (412)

And on the final page:

"New Achievement! You read a book! You managed to make it all the way through the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book without throwing it against the wall! Reward: You get to read the next book! And great news, folks. The next book has clowns and dead hookers in it!" (436)

These are examples of the smart-arsed AI descriptions designed to provoke and prod Carl before every encounter, so maybe there is a world where you can explain them away. I don't think so.

   As is often the case - daily, on most aspects of human endeavour - I find myself wondering what Douglas and Terry would have thought. A Hitchhiker's Guide particularly flashed into my brain at various points, especially with the whole aliens destroying Earth thing - what would Arthur, Ford and Zaphod have made of their (limited) choices - but Dinneman's novel is not blessed with great sophistication and certainly not understatement. At this point I was hoping for a bit of inspiration myself, another way in, but honestly I think I'd need a Cultural Studies lecturer to set me an essay title if I hope to get more out of this.  

   Do I want to write obvious things?  Should Dungeon Crawler Carl be on a Clarke shortlist? All that malarkey. 

   As usual I feel it sharply, as an injustice. I am a ridiculous human.

Dinneman doesn't need the cachet of a Clarke nomination: I can only think the Clarke desires some of Carl's popularity. Cynical, I know. #howtowinfriendsandinfluencepeople

   So, unless you're a gamer, or a Cultural Studies student, or an anthropologist, please treat yourself to Slow Gods instead. Or Metal from Heaven. Relish what genre can do in all its exhilarating, mind-blowing glory. 

Reading again and The Thing Itself

Oh truth is mutable, saith the sage. Truth is power, not science; or rather, it is science but science is power too. The strong legislate what is true, and after a while we forget that this is whence it came. Our habits of thought are stronger than strait-waistcoats. We walk about with habit-coloured spectacles before our eyes, and see everything as we are accustomed to see it’ [The Thing Itself Adam Roberts]

Reading and watching films are often the main way of navigating my way through life and trying to dislodge those habit-coloured spectacles suffused with ideology and the stories I tell about myself. I mean, sure, people ARE important but sorry, not many of them have the wisdom or the imagination of good art. That doesn't mean I'm a nasty old misanthrope, honest!

Yet, really….how does one navigate through life at all? IS it just like a river? You jump onto a passing log and see where it takes you. Sometimes you stay on for ages; sometimes you hurl yourself on to another one as soon as you can. You have some agency but not half as much as you think? It’s a cliché of course but I do imagine myself like that – generally, scarily, with a hint of Aguirre, Wrath of God in the back of my mind or else on that Mississippi steamboat with Melville’s The Confidence Man. (Or just occasionally I’m on that Houseboat with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren: so many good rivers and boats to conjure up….)

Anyway, I feel like I’ve just hurled myself off my lonely one-person raft and I’m paddling upstream in a canoe, determinedly, trying not to go with the flow, still getting stuck of course, still going back sometimes, but trying. I’m on the lookout for more canoes, villages, towns….people, for fuck’s sake. I’m 44 and feeling, often quite urgently, all the difficult contradictions of mid-life. You could have details but that would be far too uncomfortable for all of us wouldn’t it? Know for now that the autumn was a blur, frantic paddling, lovely relaxed naps whilst tied to the bank – yes we’re still in the metaphor people (!!) – and the odd episode of howling, desperately at the moon after losing my oar.

Good then that I’ve fought to read these last weeks. Good that I’ve launched into such good novels by Adam Roberts, Jeff Vandermeer and various novels on the Costa shortlists though it’s a little hard for me to judge their quality precisely. Good that I'm able to refocus and see a little differently. Reading the first novels after months of not reading is always a particular challenge - about learning to concentrate properly again, thinking critically and attending to form. First up was Adam Roberts’The Thing Itself. I admire his novels a lot and loved his last one Bête. The Thing Itself made me recall the complex, slipstream shenanigans in Christopher Priest’s The Adjacent – and the haunted scientist, Michael Kearny strand of M John Harrison’s Light. But if Priest is smooth and precise and Harrison mordant and challenging then Roberts’ novel is solidly down to earth and enjoyably easy to read even when bursting with pop culture references and high falutin philosophical ideas: comedy and bathos mix with Close Encounters of Third Kind and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

The novel begins in the 1986 in Antarctica. Two scientists are processing data in an isolated research station: they are on the lookout for alien life. One is the brilliant Roy Curtius, obsessed with Kant and the Fermi Paradox, and as the reader will discover, all kinds of crazy. The other, saner character is Charles Gardner who will narrate this strand of the novel throughout.  Gardner is a familiar voice in a Roberts novel – smart, grumpy, funny, sardonic, embattled. Tonally this first chapter begins like a clever, irreverent comedy written by Steven Moffat but ends up something altogether more hallucinatory and horrific. In subsequent chapters Gardner, his life ruined by his experiences in Antarctica, is compelled to revisit those horrific, life-changing events and face up to the truth. These chapters are full of humour, adventure and it should be said, debates both philosophical and scientific. BUT don’t be put off because Roberts has the ability to make complex ideas understandable AND interesting. Alternating with Gardner’s narrative come a number of strands that focus on seemingly unrelated characters in different times, past and future - the first sees two gay men touring Germany in 1900 for instance and is infused with Nietzsche and HG Wells. At first the links seen tenuous and insubstantial but as the novel progresses you begin to pick up on the deeper thematic and symbolic patterns and the plot elements that connect everything together. It should be said too that these alternate strands are ingenious and deeply satisfying. Here Roberts gives us a variety of voices, evocative of time and place. The effect of these layers is to proffer tension, mystery and revelation. Furthermore they underscore the interrogative nature of the novel and all the debates about the nature of reality between Charles and his interlocutors.

There is much pleasure to be had as always – a Roberts novel is so brilliantly discursive, full of ideas, irony and great prose. And funny – always funny. I also feel ridiculously pleased with myself when I catch a reference – this time quotes from Boorman’s Excalibur and Fowles’ Daniel Martin gave me particular pleasure, perhaps because they are so close to my heart. I’m not sure The Thing Itself is quite as good as Bête, mainly, harshly perhaps, because the central voice of Charles Gardner, is too reminiscent of the central voice in Bête, Graham Penhaligon. 

But the reason Roberts’ novels are getting better, and I can’t quite decide if he’ll like me saying this, is twofold. First, for me they live increasingly on the edge of genre in all the best ways – in the gaps and boundaries between sci-fi, fantasy and ‘literary’ fiction – synthesizing, questioning, reaching, blurring and demanding. Secondly, whilst the intellectual challenge is just as fierce, these last two novels feel more human, empathetic, grounded somehow – not sure of the best word (as usual) to use. But I care more, and it feels like he’s not ‘only’ (sorry Adam!) asking me to think about how I deal with philosophy or fiction or science or a million other things but reaching in and with ‘infinite tenderness’ touching my heart as well as my mind. 

The Thing Itself is another great novel and will hopefully challenge for prizes, just as Bête should have been on multiple shortlists last year.