![]() ![]() For every fleshed-out, three-dimensial Taylor, Tattletale, Defiant, Rachel, or Imp, there’s a Foil, Parian, Golem, Grue, Trickster, or Clockblocker whose development just gets dropped after a certain point, and, below them, whole armies of c-listers like Exalt, Revel, Hoyden, Wanton, Grace, Laserdream, Orbit, Skinslip, August Prince, Citrine, Jouster, Felix Swoop, Topsy, Strapping Lad, Cricket…the list goes on, and none of them make a difference, save for their powers providing a twist on a fight scene. Also maybe not surprising, but there are way too many. His bigness fixation extends in other directions as well, especially to the cast of characters. ![]() Maybe not surprising by now, but Worm badly needs an editor. If it’s not a fight scene running way too long, it’s a conversation running way too long, an inner monologue running way too long…the point is, Wildbow has my problem of being unable to write anything short, times 100. Manhattan. When considering the whole, I never thought, “Dear Lord, when is this going to end?”īad: Unfortunately, I did think that during several individual scenes. Most importantly, the book deftly manages its escalation of scope from high school sucks to guys, we have to kill Dr. Cliffhangers can feel manipulative sometimes, but they felt like natural consequences here. Each of the arcs is paced well, and the characters are often compelling enough to make them sufficient reason to keep reading. Good: As I’ve said before, for a million-word story, this thing is really readable. I’ll try to run down a few of those here. But the fact, for me at least, is that every exhilarating strength of Worm is matched by an infuriating flaw. Like I said, it’s ambitious and impressive. As you might expect from a severe deconstruction, it’s not great. It all resembles nothing so much as The Incredibles directed by Stanley Kubrick: a sincere attempt to figure out what a world with superheroes and villains running around would actually look like. Intending to use it to fight crime, she instead, through a series of unexpected events, becomes a crime lord. In the present, a high school student named Taylor gains a seemingly weak power–the ability to control insects. The plot is simple on the surface: around thirty years ago, superpowered individuals called parahumans begin surfacing on Earth, gaining various types of powers after undergoing traumatic experiences. With that in mind, anybody who plans to read this gateway web serial should beware of spoilers everywhere. It’s more for me, to deal with the residue of 22 books of stuff and to see what lessons can and should be learned. ![]() It’s clearly a labor of love, quite a bit of labor, by an author doing it out of the joy of creating (Joy is in short supply within the narrative, but I’ll get to that later). I read Worm in pieces, but powered through the last third in a binge, and, whatever else I’m going to say, I want to preface it with the fact that I respect it enormously. It’s hard to overstate how much he’s invented his own genre. The author of Worm, who goes by Wildbow and makes a living from his writing, is a crown prince in the web serial world. This medium is essentially the author blogging out a story: posted chapters form into story arcs that form the whole serial, much like a webcomic without the artwork. ![]() This novel is Worm. It’s part of an emerging genre of web serials that is catalogued in a number of places. Not that its length is its sole defining characteristic–it’s just the first thing that wallops you in the face when looking at it. Recently some people who know who they are tricked me into a reading a book that is longer than the entire Harry Potter series, and is, I learned after finishing it, actually the length of 22 average novels being published today. Look, here’s an easy-to-follow link to a Wikipedia article about underlines! Usin’ that degree. Great news! I finally realized that I should just underline my links like a normal blogging human. ![]()
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