Matthew Hughes' THE DAMNED BUSTERS #OneBookAtATime

First of all, just look at this cover! Angry Robot's design team knocked another one out of the park! And truly, it conveys pretty much exactly what you get inside.

And what is it that you get inside? Only the most plausibly implausible (or would that be implausibly plausible?) superhero story in the history of ever, that's all, fun in the way that only a story about an ordinary guy who accidentally causes a massive labor dispute in Hell and gets superpowers and a nearly omnipotent demon sidekick as part of the settlement can be fun.

And no, that's not a spoiler; all of that takes place in the first chapter or two. The fact these first few chapters are the most amusing bit of the book should not deter anyone, by the way; for this book is mostly in earnest, slightly silly premise aside. As are most superhero stories.

Chesney Anstruther is an actuary by trade, a man more at home with numbers and statistics -- and comic books -- than with human beings, despite his mother's extensive efforts to have him trained to do with his conscious, rational mind what most human beings do by instinct. So yes, probably a high functioning autistic, but maybe it can just be laid at mom's door, for she is a religious fanatic and a moralist of the strictest and most gleeful order -- her main hobby is writing scathing, hideously imaginative diatribes to whatever celebrity her favorite TV preacher picks on that week, diatribes in which the torments of Hell are lovingly detailed. So Chesney probably never stood a chance.

Then he becomes a superhero, of sorts. His settlement with Satan gives him pretty much unlimited power via his sidekick, but only for two hours a day, because his powers derive from his command over the sidekick, the amusingly sybaritic Xaphan, who has to be taken off his usual sinner-punishment detail to serve Chesney. He'll do anything Chesney demands, without loopholes, as long as Chesney's demands don't interfere with the fulfillment of anyone else's, more conventional, deals with the Devil.

Ah, there's the rub. Because it seems that some pretty important people have such deals in place, including, perhaps, Chesney's top boss, W.T. Paxton, tycoon and would-be politician, who is soon pursuing Chesney's superhero self (the Actionary!) with a proposition: help Paxton fight crime, and get access to all of the work of Paxton's firm, including the services of a crack team of top notch reasearchers and actuaries. Including Chesney himself. Oh, and Paxton has a mind-bendingly beautiful daughter, Poppy whom Chesney only seems able to talk to coherently while disguised as the Actionary...

So of course all of this comes into entertaining conflict, made just that more interesting by the introduction of yet another attractive girl, Melda, to turn Chesney's head and draw him into uncomfortable situations. And make Poppy jealous.

All of this combines into a pretty standard superhero plot, and that would make for a pretty decent read right there, but for two things. One is a stiff and mannered narrative voice that gets pretty distracting over the course of the novel -- for instance, throughout the book, Chesney is referred to as "the young man" over and over and over again* -- and the other is the author's insistence on playing a big meta-fiction game, to wit, the central argument the book is making is that it is a novel, a novel that God (aka Matthew Hughes himself) is writing, and it's a draft, and everything can change if the author changes his mind (as said author has many times in the past, or good Christians like Chesney's mother and her beloved TV preacher friend, Rev. Hardacre [who becomes Chesney's mentor] would never touch pork or shellfish or wear clothing made from more than one kind of fiber), and moreover it's going to change, so it's unlikely that contracts made with the Devil are going to be binding because the next big change is coming very soon. Or so the prevailing theory goes.

So uh, if you don't like characters discussing, sometimes at length, their status as characters in a novel, this might not be the book for you. Me, I'm on the fence a bit. Most of the time, I do not like this. I was a languages and literature major once upon a time and still bear the psychic scars of a whole course on meta-fiction and so generally hate this kind of twee crap like poison. But I quite enjoyed the goofy take on a superhero story and still have just enough curiosity about where all of this is going to have a look sometime at the book's two extant sequels, both of which I already have on my reading devices thanks to Angry Robot's ebook subscription.

I just hope it doesn't wind up being all about the meta-fiction. I really, really do.

*But then we come to a passage -- and mind you, this book is very much set in the present, meaning the 21st century -- where we find him sounding much older than he could reasonably be for a character constantly referred to as "the young man": "Chesney could remember when going tieless and unshaven was a mark of low socio-economic poverty." So he was around during the Mad Men era, was he? Yeah, so he's quite the whippersnapper.

100 Books #102 - Mark A. Rayner's FRIDGULARITY

Note: the author graciously supplied the blogger with an eARC (electronic advance review copy) of this book (available Nov. 21st at all the usual ebook outlets). I say graciously because he didn't know if I would like it or say nice things about it or not, he just thought I'd like it, and we're Twitter buddies. And because I did say nice things about a previous book of his, Marvelous Hairy, under similar circumstances. He plays the odds well, that Mark.

"People are willing to die for Twitter, you know."

The "Internet of Things" is barely a thing and already there is someone satirizing the living Snape out of it.

That person is Mark A. Rayner, who, it seems, never met a science fiction/fact trope that he didn't want to mock thoroughly and well (witness his astonishing short fiction tour-de-force, Pirate Therapy, to which he provides ample links in his Twitter feed, not to mention the aforementioned Marvelous Hairy).

Get past the smiles -- the internet emerges into conscious intelligence but decides, somehow, that its interface with the human world will be through the screen on the web-enabled refrigerator belonging to Blake Givens, Canadian doofus -- though, and you'll see that Rayner has more on his mind than just cheap laughs at the expense of our dependence on digital technology and how weird that is making the world. For part and parcel with the intelligence's emergence is its takeover of all of said technology for its own growth and purposes. Zathir, as it/they start calling itself/themselves*, has taken away the internet, leaving humanity to make do with whatever old analog technology it can scrounge up and get working again to stay alive and function as a society.**

As has been posited by the sort of people who like to think about happenstances like this one -- by which I mean pretty much every doomsday type we know -- the younger generations handle this the least well. Rayner milks much humor from scenarios of bereft social media addicts "playing Twitter" by passing around Post-It notes with 140 character messages, complete with hashtags, "playing Pinterest" by pinning magazine cut-outs onto Blake's couch, and scrawling on the walls of Blake's house to recreate a certain other social media outlet that it makes my head vomit to contemplate and so I will not name here. While others rebuild the world, these "Networked" await more messages from Zathir via Blake's kitchen. It's a very funny notion, except when it's not.

Which is to say that Rayner does a very fine job, indeed, of balancing between mockery and hand-wringing, even before this scenario explodes into ridiculous and appalling sectarian conflict and poetry slamming. And while Rayner's absurdist edge is never far from view, for long stretches of this story the man is dead serious. He has not only thought of the comedic but the tragic possibilities of a post-Internet world in which we have allowed our non-virtual skills to wither and dwindle into something we have to look up in what dead-tree books we haven't destroyed to scan into ebook form.

And, in Blake, he's given us a believable everyman, not a complete hero (though he does manage some physical feats that the average netizen would probably find all but impossible), but not an utter boob either (except when the Girl of His Dreams is around). Martin Freeman could play him credibly in the film version, though he might be a bit old. Pitted against him is one "Lord" Sona, a former hardcore videogamer who has turned his WoW-oid online posse into a real-world freakshow-cum-religious crusade that has declared jihad on Zathir and Blake, because, well, what else is a fat guy with a pizza fixation going to do in this world, apparently?

In truth, Sona's villainy is probably the least plausible element in the story, even as it is also the most entertaining. He's an over-the-top combination of pathos and puissance even when he isn't being undercut by his choice of undergarment or home furnishings. All that's missing is a mustache to twirl, but somebody else got that, for this story.

All in all, Fridgularity is a fun way to think about the unthinkable. Can the world really be brought to this kind of a pass, this way? Probably not. But it could be something like this, a little, that brings it all down, and it never hurts to be reminded of that, does it?

Hold onto those shortwave radios, kids.

*As makes sense for a conglomeration of too-intelligent household appliances, social media networks, newswire services and military guidance systems, it sometimes seems like a singular and sometimes a collective entity, its font choices on Blake's refrigerator screen providing the most important clue to how it's regarding itself at any given time.

**This includes, delightfully, a renewed importance for the good old DX crew, ham radio operators who to this day maintain completely informal contact with the rest of the world via home-built radios and antennas and the catch-as-catch can nature of analog radio waves through the earth's atmosphere. One of my best friends is one of these guys, and I can't wait to put this book in his hands. Thank goodness he's not such a quasi-Luddite that he doesn't read ebooks!