This month's IWSG question is about NaNoWriMo--that's a lot of acronyms or whatever. To answer the question, I did officially participate in it 10 years ago and "won." You can read my "journey" in three posts here, here, and here. Being classy, I called it NaNoWhineMo because it was just me whining about what I was doing on it. On to today's entry!
Friday I finished reading another sci-fi comedy called Max and the Multiverse. It had some fun bits but mostly I didn't really like it. If not for the talking cat(!?!) I probably would have only given it two stars but the talking cat(!?!) was fun enough that I gave it three stars.
What really bugged is one of those things I realize after I've finished the book. In this case that there was no real payoff for the whole Max multiverse thing. At the start of the story, the eponymous Max is a gamer who falls asleep and hits some keys that somehow give him the ability to jump universes randomly when he falls asleep. There's one with dinosaurs running around like that third Jurassic World movie and one where everyone talks like Yoda--except Yoda, who talks like we do--and then one where religion never really took root and everything is like Star Trek. Max then goes into space with the cat, who's transferred into an artificial body that can talk with a British accent.
A week or so earlier I re-edited my sci-fi comedy Chet Finley vs The Machines of Fate and for the most part I still enjoy it. What I think I did better than Max and the Multiverse is what happens to Chet at the beginning actually matters in the end. Instead of banging his head to slide between multiverses, Chet has this hobby of working on old computers. He's working on one and gets a shock--and then sees a robot "angel" named Ziggy and finds out that robots like Ziggy have been manipulating humans for a galactic betting scheme for centuries. Like Max, Chet eventually goes out into space, only in this case to escape being killed by Ziggy's masters and maybe expose the scam to free Earth. He, Ziggy, a shapeshifting assassin named Sadie, and the Care Bear-looking Dr. Irony end up on a strange planet that's inhabited only by a little girl and some old robots.
Where Chet's hobby pays off is that he's able to fix the robots tending to the girl and to help stop the ones hunting them. The house they find has a really old computer system that uses an operating system a lot like BASIC or whatever, which Chet knows from working with the old computers. Thus he's able to do something useful at the end that ties to what happens at the beginning.
By contrast, all Max does at the end is "speak nerd" to some scientist guy and...not really do much other than stand around. Like I said, the multiverse thing doesn't come into it at all. It's really just a means to get him into space, but as you can see with Chet (or Hitchhiker's Guide to which we're both indebted) there are other ways to get your dorky guy into space. (Maybe just have a mad scientist shoot him into space and force him to watch bad movies.)
If you give someone a unique ability, it's good if he or she uses it in the end so it can tie to the beginning. Really this was a problem I had with shows like Titans, Doom Patrol, and season 1 of Picard where it seemed like most of the characters didn't really contribute anything at the end. It really makes the story lack symmetry and just in general feel half-assed.
Buuuut that Max book won some kind of awards and my book has sold nothing so what the hell do I know, right?
2 comments:
Shooting him into space to watch bad movies works for me. Maybe Max needed to watch A Talking Cat? Wait, that's RiffTrax. Heck, same thing!
It's probably just me, but comedy in science fiction seems to make it seem so silly. It's like the two just don't go together that well. I guess I should try reading more of it. :)
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