Michael R. Underwood, Attack the Geek: a Ree Reyes Side-quest (2014)

I disliked this book. I also misliked it, unliked it, de-liked it and anti-liked it. Maybe if I'd read the previous 'Ree Reyes' novels that latter reaction wouldn't have been so anti. But then again, do we really need the previous instalments when Underwood gives us the kind of complete summation of character of which Proust himself, were he alive, would surely be envious? 'Ree Reyes (Strength 10, Dexterity 14, Stamina 12, Will 18, IQ 16, Charisma 15—Geek 7/Barista 3/Screenwriter 3/Gamer Girl 2/Geekomancer 2)' [13]. Rees and her pals are able to access magic skills, plus Harry Potter wands and lightsabres and so on, by invoking various genre pop-culture references; and these they use to fight goblins, gnomes, minotaurs and other monsters through sewers and geek boutiques ('bout-giques'?) called things like 'Grognard's Grog and Games'. It's a sort of D&D game come to life, and the longer it went on the more tiresome and charmless I found it. It wants to be Buffy; but Buffy had dialogue to die for. This book has (to pick some examples at random) '"Thou shalt not fuck with one of thy best friend's relationships" she told herself' [19]; "You know what? Fuck you, you worthless piece of shit." [52]; '"Holy Shit!" Rees said.' [117]; '"The fuck?" Rees asked' [128]; "Motherfucking fireballs" [174]. Oscar Fucking Wilde it fucking ain't. The plot is a hectic mishmash of bewildering interactions, fighting, swearing and running through shit. But the real problem is the author's inability to bridge the 'you had to be there' divide. The point of this book is to capture some of the joy (a genuine and wondrous joy) we feel when we hang out without friends and do fun things, like playing games. You try to pass the joy along, saying 'we had a blast man! Eastwood said this really hilarious thing!' But when you repeat the hilarious thing, you find your interlocutors are only smiling politely, and not dissolving in helpless laughter the way you did. Now, a writer worth her/his salt can recreate the ambience and make the hilarity come alive again. Underwood can't do this.

But that's fine. Your dice-age may vary, and I (Pomposity 10, Fondness-for-Nabokov 9, Englishness 879) am surely not the target audience here. But, at the risk of pushing my pomposity score even higher, I found myself wondering whether this short novel figures not as a celebration of geek culture and in-crowd together, but instead as an indictment of it. When your friends swear, especially swear inventively, it is funny, because they're your friends, and you know they don't actually mean to harm you. But when somebody you don't know swears at you it is unpleasant and intimidating and scary. There are reasons why the idiom of courtesy is the right one for public interactions. But SF, in its faceless online conversations, very often loses sight of this. I'm guessing this is compounded of the fact that (a) if I swear aggressively in, say, a tweet, you may decide to take this as a sign that (though we've never met) you and I are friends, and grant me leeway. So perhaps the hyperprofane idiom is assumed by some to be a kind of bonding ritual. There may also (b) be a failure of empathy, or more complexly a failure to understand that the Other who has never met you has no grounds to empathise with you, behind this: the fabled asperger's-spectrum personality limitations of the geek. So if I tweet that (to pick an example out of the air) Paolo Bacigalupi should have acid thrown in his face for his portrayal of Thai characters, it may be that you assume everyone will know you aren't serious. Hey! Nobody who knows me would think I would actually throw acid in anyone's face! The failing here, of course, is that other people, including the textually assaulted Bacigalupi himself, don't know you, and have no reason to give you the benefit of any doubt. Verbal assault is still assault. Then again, (c) I wonder if the main problem is a broader inability of tonal nuance. If Geek A has a disagreement with another person over some matter, and addresses him/her with 'Fuck you. You can fucking bleed-out in a back alley while I sit watching you, sipping my caffè macchiato'. Perhaps Geek A thinks that the main effect of such expression is to convey just how vehemently s/he feels about the point at issue. But that's not the main effect. The main effect is to paint Geek A as callous and violent. The vehemence is in service of a deeply unattractive pointed discourtesy. There are better ways of disagreeing; and by better I mean 'more effective' for any metric of effective you prefer. And there are much, much better ways of writing insults into books. Let it be written in ten-foot-high letters in the public agora of genre, that nobody miss it: VEHEMENCE AND VIOLENCE ARE NOT THE SAME THING.