Wild Massive, by Scotto Moore (Tordotcom)
In the center of the multiverse, the Building reaches toward
a brilliant orange sky. It’s so vast and so tall that no one can count all its
floors. In fact, there is a guild devoted to mapping and exploring them and the
diverse, often weird and deadly cultures that have evolved. Some of these give
rise to beings, human and otherwise, possessing combinations of technology and arcane
magical or psychic powers. A large portion of the known Building falls under
the malign auspices of the Association, which has already wiped out one race of
magic-users and seems bent on destroying a second. The present action begins
when a shapershifter renegade from the second psychic race lands on top of the semi-sentient
elevator inhabited by the sole survivor of the first. From there, the tale ranges
from supernatural politics, power struggles between uber-cyborg warriors and
near-divine incarnations of creativity, outlaws armed with Plot Twists and
Coincidences, vials containing consciousness-altering memories, a writer who
can change the course of history through a screenplay, and so forth, not to
mention the bizarre Disney-esque theme park chain, the eponymous Wild Massive.
To say the book is chock full of enough creativity to fill an entire shelf of
ordinary tomes is an understatement. Therein lies both the strength and the
shortcomings of Wild Massive.
First of all, the book is very long. This can be a good
thing or a bad thing, but in this case, the length feels as if it is driven by
a need to include an enormous amount of backstory and number of characters. In
the afterword, the author relates how the story began as a game, morphed into several
plays, and finally settled into a single narrative. As a result, if I were
asked whose story it is and what the central conflict and turning points are, I’d
be hard-pressed. The two characters I described above are nominally the
protagonists, but there are so many point-of-view shifts, each one having to do
with a different character and goal/obstacle, that the center of the
book becomes—and remains--unclear. I would very much have preferred the book be
broken into shorter novels set in the same world but each one centering on a
different character with their own history, goals, and sorrows.
The complexity of the world of the Building, its history,
and its inhabitants is wonderful. It’s full of people, events, and concepts or
incarnations, each one of which offers the occasion for stopping the action for
detailed exposition. At the beginning of a long book, a certain amount of
orientation is not a bad thing, although perhaps best done by choice of detail,
revelation of character, action, and tension. However, Wild Massive is
riddled with long explanations, even toward the very end. The effect is a
patchwork of ideas and setting, action and character, in which the forward
momentum gets set aside all too often. A second consequence of the dizzying
shifts and halts is, for me, a loss of connection with the principal characters.
I cheered on our protagonists in the battle sequence at Wild Massive Prime
(which reminded me of Peter Jackson’s 45-minute tour de force Battle of
Helm’s Deep) but I never felt as if I knew them more than superficially or cared
whether they (or anyone) got together in the end.
Scotto Moore is a writer of immense creativity, well worth checking out. Some readers will love this book for the same reasons I had difficulty with it. I look forward to seeing his next, and I hope you will, too.
