Nightmarish villains with superhuman enhancements.
An all-seeing social network that tracks your every move.
Mysterious, smooth-talking power players who lurk behind the scenes.
A young woman from the trailer park.
And her very smelly cat.
Together, they will decide the future of mankind.
Get ready for a world in which anyone can have the powers of a god or the fame of a pop star, in which … of a god or the fame of a pop star, in which human achievement soars to new heights while its depravity plunges to the blackest depths. A world in which at least one cat smells like a seafood shop’s dumpster on a hot summer day.
This is the world in which Zoey Ashe finds herself, navigating a futuristic city in which one can find elements of the fantastic, nightmarish and ridiculous on any street corner. Her only trusted advisor is the aforementioned cat, but even in the future, cats cannot give advice. At least not any that you’d want to follow.
Will Zoey figure it all out in time? Or maybe the better question is, will you? After all, the future is coming sooner than you think.
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For those of you looking for more humor along the lines of John Dies at the End, understand that this is a very different book. It has Wong’s characteristic humor, sarcasm, and absurdity. But, much as JDATE is a send-up of B-movie horror, this is a more maturely written story that is in-line with Blade Runner with a healthy dose of Bill and Ted.
In the past, I’ve copped to an affection for books that I describe as “a box full of crazy” (for example, Beat the Reaper, Tim Dorsey’s Serge Storms series, and Bunker 13). These kinds of books have a kind of maniac energy that pull me through even the most demented situations. That’s what I thought I was getting here. Alas.
Futuristic Violence, in summary, sounds like it can be the real deal. Zoey Ashe, a 20-ish potential refugee from Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, discovers she’s the only child of recently-blown-to-bits zillionaire Arthur Livingston. She’s immediately set upon by legions of crazed, supercharged bounty hunters who want to collect the price on her head. Livingston’s slightly-less-crazed retainers rescue her as a part of an outlandish plot to defeat a meatheaded supervillain dubbed Moloch and retain control of technology that can turn otherwise ordinary misfits into superheroes (or supervillains, as they wish). Zoey also has a cat.
That’s the summary. The problem comes in the execution.
To be fair, it has its moments. The author (better known for This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It and John Dies at the End) shoots the beginning of the story out of a cannon and makes the first few chapters fly like a rocket. He gets off a goodly number of deadpan one-liners and has a talent for setting up completely absurd situations that nonetheless have a certain insane logic to them. The main arena for the action — Tabula Ra$a, a libertarian dystopia built by a coterie of billionaires in the middle of the Utah desert — is something like Vegas-meets-Blade Runner; it’s vividly rendered and easily visualized, though it never feels like a real place.
Beyond that lies murky waters, though. Books like these don’t want to be very long. The kind of humor — and velocity — needed for success has a definite shelf life; go too long and your reader gets desensitized by the bludgeoning. FV&FS goes on and on, hitting the same notes repeatedly and with decreasing effectiveness.
This can be excused if the characters are magnetic and you can stick with them through even the slow bits. Unfortunately, the characters here are collections of stereotypes and tics, and except for the fairly large number who die, not one of them has much of an arc. Even Zoey, the putative heroine, is as empty-headed at the end as she is at the start, despite having undergone almost four hundred pages of life-altering experiences. Moloch is the nightmare version of the kind of testosterone-poisoning victim who tries to run over small animals on his way to the liquor store; his Ayn Rand-infused ranting is straight out of talk radio, but that’s about all he has going for him.
There’s nothing wrong with Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits that couldn’t be fixed with ~100 fewer pages, better character development, and more thorough editing. (If nothing else, this is the counter-argument to people who slam indie authors because of their poor proofreading.) I wanted to like this book much more than I actually did. In the end, the author let the crazy get the best of him, which is the one thing you can’t do when you play in this sandbox.
Very funny, violent book. The cat was a great addition. Can’t wait to see where this goes in the next book.
* David Wong has created the most irreverent, foul and inventive villain ever created in print. I have considered him, (the author), because of the things he has conceived, a total maladjusted, sick, perverted, insane human being ! That said, it does not reflect very well on those of us that thoroughly enjoyed reading this book !
Author definitely channels the spirit of Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide…), but with an even more nihilistic bent. Perceptive extrapolation of tech and social media into the near future.
Interesting prospective.
I think what I love so much about David Wong books is that between the pearls of insight that make you ponder the human condition, you’re laughing uncontrollably at all the dick jokes.