"Fuck the hype!" I generally exclaim when anyone recommends a book I've seen publishers promote TF out of. I want to promote books that you haven't heard of, books the Big 5 doesn't care about. Books with authors who won't get the big money spent on them because they don't have the right friends, the right family, the "people in high places" that some authors have. Rage Against the Nepo Baby I always say.

I've never done a hate read before, but there is so little being actively promoted in the Sci-fi world with all the big money being spent on Romantasy. And hey, I get it. Hard to read about dystopia when we're actively living in it. Talk about triggering.

But I miss LitRPG with a desperation. From the moment I picked up a Tad Williams book in an airport snack shop when I was 12 years old, transporting myself and my 8 year old brother 2,000 miles alone (can you believe they actually let children do that? Still blows my mind) I have adored the idea that I could get sucked out of this world and into a game.

If you remember you get a cookie, but just a few short months ago, I picked up Matt Dinniman's standalone book Operation Bounce House and well... it wasn't for me. This book was seemingly about Palestine for a while. Colonization, an entire planet framed as "terrorists" so that corporations could steal their land with the backing of the populace. And a cool premise - on another planet with regular people who are PAYING to pilot remote transformer-like kill bots instead of the state paying to fund a war. Definitely sounds like the whole Torment Nexus thing (a famous meme:)

Sci-fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus.)

Like, this definitely sounds like something Silicon Valley Bros would dream up.

As a plot device, brilliant. But the whole story is very man-centric. Very little character development, no side quest plots to get me invested in the characters, and tons and tons and tons of talk about the exact gun each bot is equipped with. The ending was also predictable and boring. I wanted something deeper for a book that seemed to have a big point to make, but the author didn't quite bring it home in a way that had any sort of impact.

So why oh why did I finally give in to the Dungeon Crawler Carl propaganda? I mean, that's how propaganda works isn't it? Say something enough times and people will eventually believe it. Do I? No. Did I read it anyway? Yes. Did it have all the same issues as Operation Bounce House? Also yes.

And did I read 3 whole books into the series before finally (probably, possibly, a very unfirm maybe) throw in the towel? Yes. All you Reggies (a term I picked up from the book Mindwalker referring to regular people, which I have now adopted into my lexacon. If you are still using the term Muggle I swear to John Mercymorn I'm putting marrow in your soup) won't understand this, but I cannot DNF books. It's a very unfortunate function of my autism that I cannot start something without finishing it. It's called Autistic Inertia. Reggies can have this to an extent, but not in a disabling way. You might feel that desire for completion when you're doing a puzzle to put that last piece in. I will start painting a room and will not eat, sleep, pee, or even drink water until it's finished at 2am, and then I'll need a few days to recover from the abuse I just put myself through. The only accommodation my family has developed is my 14 year old enjoying his opportunity to righteously berate me until I go pee and drink a glass of water and eat a meal with him. And then stop me when I try to start a new project the next day. Every time I do this I laugh that I ever believed I was taking up too much space in the autistic community. As if it's a privilege I have to earn rather than the disability it feels like.

Let's jump off that infodumping train and back onto Dungeon Crawler Carl, which if you haven't heard, is a Lit RPG about a dude and his girlfriend's cat fighting their way through an alien dungeon to save themselves from the apocalypse (in which aliens have repo'd the earth for it's minerals.) On the surface, what a great premise and way to talk about how capitalism eats our world - resources and humans alike. And does Dinniman delve into that? Well yes, a bit. He could make the point a little harder to me - which is the same way I felt about Hunger Games, like Suzanne, girl, you wrote a great series talking about how the US is The Bad Place™ but some of them still don't get it, you really needed to draw those parallels more obviously for the American populace with a reading level below the 6th grade. They ain't critical-ling this reading babes.

And by book 3, he's really really focused on the game itself. There are a couple of side plots developing, but it's not enough to keep me interested. The typical structure of a series is that each book resolves the current battle while introducing a bigger baddie for the MC to fight in the overall war. In this series, we just jump down a level deeper into the game. In book 3 he builds some mistrust between the two beloved main characters, one of which is an actual cat who can talk. Listen, I truly think it was the talking cat that made me finally pick it up. But what isn't there in the third book is hope. Hope is what makes you continue. All we see is the human race being slowly genocided and no hope that anyone ever makes it to the 13th floor (the 18th has to be beat to win and save humanity. Everything and everyone in the book tells you that's never happened, not even close.) We do get a tiny bit of introspection from our main character, a coast guard by day guy who got cheated on by his girlfriend by night, and his grief of his lost world and family. But it's mostly anger sighs in patriarchy and gets a little repetitive, even though it's very little. And Carl is also called out for only liking his own ideas, and immediately dismissing any woman's idea that is presented. He has a male mentor that he values highly, but he has a cat with intelligence points WAY above his that he fails to listen to at all. And a side character that he upgrades as if she isn't a real person but a tool he can use. Yes, he gets called out. No, he does no introspection into why he does that or how to stop. He just continues on as if he's not hurting the people around him.

The whole series just feels a bit shallow to me. And here's the thing...if Carl actually takes the criticism and grows from it at some point in the series, that will be great! The gamer bro audience this series is marketed to could use that lesson. But with how it's going, I don't know if that lesson is coming, or whether Carl is going to win despite all his flaws. Which is the exact message we don't need men hearing yet again.

I put the series down. I picked up She's A Doll by Barbara Truelove.

Have you continued beyond book 3? Does Carl learn? You might convince me to continue. It won't take much, I'm fighting the autistic inertia with every ounce of my defiant PDA...

— Zee

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