Book Review: A Wild and Weird Game-Based Novel from Scotto Moore

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.