(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
Science fiction as a genre is usually not short of big, epic, mind-blowing ideas.
Those kinds of ideas, all space operatic, wildly imaginative and fearlessly brave, are the genre’s stock in trade; if you can dream it, sci-fi can make it even better than you dreamt it to be and take it to places that adds some escapist bling to sometimes fairly mundane existences.
If you’ve read any sci-fi, you will no this deep in your book-loving marrow, but even those of us who’ve have long supped at the table of big ideas and daringly epic execution will find Scotto Moore’s Wild Massive to be one of those novels that blows all the things you thought sci-fi could be, and is, well and truly out of the water (on a far and distant alien world, of course).
For a book with such an imposingly audacious storyline, Wild Massive is all centred on a building; yep, just one building BUT, and here’s the kicker, this building, this singular building, goes up and up and up for literally tens of thousands of floors, each of them a world unto their intricately, impressively unique own.
Even more gobsmackingly amazing, this building of myriad environments and races and magical energy sits right at the centre of the multiverse, the sci-fi trope du jour, an intersection of so many realities and possibilities that just about any eventuality can come to pass.
‘Should I feel guilty about it?’ she thought to ask.
‘Not overly,’ the shapeshifter said.
‘Doors are opening,’ the cloudlet said.
‘Shit,’ Carissa said, drawing her pistol.
A pleasant ding sounded, and then the doors opened.
For all of its otherness, and Wild Massive has it in gigantic alien bucketloads, the Building is grounded in some fairly everyday political machinations.
Don’t think for a moment that Moore doesn’t use these in incredibly inventive ways because he does, but suffice to say that in a place where some people have all manner of psychic gifts and form and function do not match anything that we know here on a good old bog standard earth – which, by the way, is somewhere in the Building but sliced and diced on various floors and yeah, the scene of some of the Building’s less salubrious addresses (which surprises you not) – everyone is grappling with fairly cut-and-dry concepts of power, governance and intrigue.
In other words, magical and defying our fairly unadventurous take on reality though the Building may be, there’s the good old struggle between the haves and the havenots, between authoritarian rulers and those seeking to find freedom by any means necessary.
In the middle of all this Machiavellian posturing, people are also trying to make money and entertain people, and it’s at this fantastically weird but immensely relatable junction that Wild Massive spins its sprawlingly chaotic but laser-like focussed narrative of people trying to defy destiny, to stare down the inevitable and to upset the apple carts of a thousand entrenched ideas.
And it all comes down to one woman, Carissa, the member of a race who has seen far better days, and who, as Wild Massive opens, is content to spend her very small life in one of the AI-sentient lifts who race up and down and between floors, eating whatever her reality fabricator spits out and trying to stay out of the way of all the machinations swirling around her.
(courtesy Book Page)
But then fate, god dammit, intervenes, and her cosy existence is ripped asunder as a quite extraordinary shapeshifter – let’s be clear here, yes shapeshifters are in and of themselves pretty damn amazing as an idea but Moore finds a way to turbocharge and adrenalise the concept in some jawdroppingly fantastical and yet highly relatable ways – drops onto her lift, followed by even more shapeshifters on his tail and suddenly cosy goes out way out of the window, flies out the door and hurtles up and down thousands of floors, even to the top of the Building where something quite incredible, exciting and scary waits.
It turns out that this shapeshifter has a grievance with the Building’s ruling body, one so profound that he is willing to set off a reality bomb that would annihilate hundreds of floors, which may not sound like a lot when you have tens of thousands of floors at your disposal but which would shake the Building as it stands down to its very core.
Which is obviously the idea of what’s deemed a terrorist act, but here’s where Wild Massive gets even more interesting because just like in our world, one’s man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, and while the shapeshifter guy isn’t innocent of all crimes levelled against him, nor is he as culpable as some would like to say.
Even with most of their individual talents all coiled up inside her, she wasn’t ready to face a fight like this without Kellin around..
‘I’m staying, actually,’ she said. ‘I’m one of the reasons this is going down.’
‘Ohhh … are you one of the fugitives?’
Carissa nodded and said, ‘I need to stay here and punch the Association in the face as hard as possible.’
Honestly, saying all that doesn’t even begin to do justice to a mad scramble of a novel which is full of stunningly immense ideas, suffused with humanity, good and bad, that will take your breath away and yet which feels like an instructive take on the world in which we live.
As technology meets sorcery and collides helter-skelter with media and theme parks, Wild Massive takes you on a HUGE ride across worlds, to races and places who might be able to shift reality and bend energy to their calculating whims, but which comes down to one simple thing – people simply want the freedom to be themselves and preserve the agency that comes with that uniqueness.
Trouble is, just like in our reality, the Building and those who control it, are not very good at simply letting others be – unless, of course, it’s in their interests to do so but then what happens if that interest sits opposed to someone else’s?; yep chaos and batshit crazy shenanigans ensue – and this is where Wild Massive gets its fuel, its momentum and its chutzpah, a whirling dervish of astounding ideas, consequential action, and grounding humanity which lives in worlds and places far beyond our own but which lives and breathes the concerns that keep people around the world awake at night and on the street agitating for change.
If you want your mind blown and your capacity for imagination set aflame in luminously acrobatic ways, then read Wild Massive; you may come for the dazzlingly out-there premise and the thrilling start but you will stay for the humanity, the magic, the groundedness and the all-embracing sense of gigantic fun, and you will finish the story knowing a whole lot more about what makes any being tick and why it is we will do anything to live the lives that matter to us and to be the people we were created to be.