Max B’s New Speculative Fiction Novel

My informal policy is I don’t read SFF books by white guys, and honestly, when I do contravene my policy, I often regret it. So the fact that I read not one but two SFF books by white dudes, back to back, should tell you something about how much I like these guys’ previous books.

There were, however, flaws in my plan. Chief amongst them is the fact that for the goddamn life of me, I could not tell these two books apart. Twitter would mention them. Anticipated books lists would include them. Publicists would email about me. Every time I’d be like “ah yes I am already aware” or sometimes “ah yes I have a review copy of that” BUT DID I? Nobody knows or can prove the answer one way or the other.¹ As you can see, these two books are both speculative fiction, both written by authors named Max whose surnames begin with B, both titled with a single word that is frankly practically an anagram.² The spines even look the same! In a world where I cannot walk from the living room to the kitchen for a glass of water without forgetting what I had intended to do (#COVID), it is frankly unreasonable of publishers to inflict such a plight on me.

That being said, the books were good. Let me tell you about them, and then I will tell you the other flaw in my plan.

First I read Providence, by Max Barry, the author of Lexicon, a book I stayed up very late reading a few years ago even though everyone who knows me knows that I always always always get eight hours of sleep. Eight hours of sleep or bust. Naturally if Max Barry was going to have a new book out, I was going to want to get in on this action. Providence is about a crew of four people aboard a warship powered by an AI. They are going out into deep space, just the four of them, to fight these alien creatures called salamanders that spit tiny black holes at you and appear to exist in near-infinite numbers. The AI does most of the work, until the ship starts malfunctioning.

From the very beginning, Providence tells you that they’re fighting two wars at once. Talia, the Life Officer (i.e., an exhausting-for-her combination of HR and Marketing), believes that the primary war is the publicity blitz: The AI can handle the salamanders, but it’s up to the crew to be sufficiently brave and winning and photogenic that the people back on Earth continue to care about them and continue, therefore, to fund the war. The other officers — Jackson, the captain; Anders, the weapons guy; and Gilly, the tech guy — are more contemptuous of the war for public opinion. They care about keeping the ship running and continuing to win their battles against the salamanders. But as you gradually and horrifyingly realize, the two wars being fought aren’t necessarily the ones the crews first believed.

I liked this book because although it’s about Space and Space Wars, a lot of page space is devoted to just, like, office drama. It’s just that when there’s office drama and you’re isolated with your office for years at a time and you have very little contact with home and you’re on a ship armed with weapons that’s fighting an unknowable foe, the…. stakes get a little higher. The stakes do but the methods don’t. As Life Officer, Talia still spends most of her time trying to find the right words to say to keep the crew at their best. In a sense she’s manipulating them. In another sense she’s sincere and careful.

A spoiler: I love books where a situation seems to be one thing and then, surprise! It’s actually this other thing! Providence pulls a particularly neat trick because it stays the thing it first told you it was, a story about the war between salamanders and humans, in which the ship and its AI are the principal weapon. It’s just also, and maybe primarily, a story about a war between the AI and the salamanders, in which the humans are the primary weapon. Or maybe the battlefield. Anyway it’s a cool fucking trick, and a story about stories, and a fast-paced space adventure thriller. If you liked The Martian but wanted there to be more there there, I recommend Providence.

Immediately after that I read Max Brooks’s new novel Devolution. The full title is Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, and I was like “pfffft I will not find a Sasquatch book scary at all.” I failed to account for two things: one, which I will mention below re: flaws in my plan; and another, which is that Max Brooks is good at doing suspense. Which I knew. It is, in fact, why I wanted to read his book.

Katie and Dan’s marriage is on the rocks when they move into a utopian community called Greenloop, in Washington State. The idea is to maintain a green-friendly lifestyle, which is dependent on smart technology in all the houses and regular drone deliveries of things like groceries and, um, everything else. This is all well and good until Mt. Rainier erupts. In the years since then, rescue teams finally found Greenloop, discovering the bodies of most of the community members … and Katie’s carefully kept journal.

I can’t remember if I’ve told y’all this, but I have this game I play sometimes (on museum tours, or in meetings where my input isn’t required, or during long boring panels, or on public transportation) where I imagine that everyone else in the world is dead and it’s just me and the people in my subway car / meeting / auditorium who have survived the cataclysmic event and must now make the best of things. Devolution is basically that same game, except in addition to the cataclysmic event there’s Something Out There. (It is Bigfoots.) A Bosnian Muslim woman called Mostar is the first to recognize that they’re on their own, and the first to start preparing for the worst, but eventually the whole community will have to band together, or else be destroyed. And in the same way that I enjoy my morbid museum game, I enjoyed Devolution. It’s one of those everyone-gets-picked-off-one-by-one-so-the-only-question-is-is-there-going-to-be-a-final-girl-or-nah books. Which Providence is too, actually.

So that brings me to the other flaw in my plan. Both of these books turned out to be about small, unprepared people trying to survive attacks by an unknowable enemy, as their allies and loved ones are gradually ripped away from them and their plan of cowering at home where things are safe proves increasingly unworkable. This has a certain degree of applicability to our quarantimes. I should not have read these books back to back. I could just about manage one of them, but by the time I got close to the end of Devolution I was teetering on the edge of nervous collapse and almost had to take an afternoon off.³

My recommendation: Read both of these books if the premises appeal to you! They are good! But just do not read both of them in a single week.