00:00:25.400But really, it just stands for Not My Mom, Margaret S. Willison.
00:00:29.500Oh, oh, I see. Yes. So, you know, really important that I protect my SEO against her because she is rapacious. She just does so much in the public eye. She's definitely not like she has to get a lot of yard work done right now.
00:00:46.020And she won't let us give her name or address to anyone until we're, like, confident there's someone we'd want to work with because that would be sharing too much of her personal data with the world.
00:01:00.340So, like I say, I really have to protect my SEO against it.
00:01:03.280I just got to be really insistent that that H is there.
00:01:31.080We're going to talk about the books, the book series in a way that will be introductory and very accessible to anyone who has not encountered the books yet, maybe has heard about them.
00:01:41.320But we're also going to talk about it, hopefully, in an interesting enough way that people who are obsessed with these books will still find it interesting to listen.
00:01:54.160We're also we're going to talk about form and we're going to talk about style.
00:01:59.580We're going to talk about why these books have become known as the books that everyone in your life who doesn't normally read, reads.
00:02:08.240like that's kind of the way that they have been understood uh we're going to talk about reading
00:02:13.740outside of your normal genre which is definitely something that was happening for me um propulsiveness
00:02:19.520uh video games uh positive masculinity yeah video games are such an important part of this
00:02:27.780conversation yes and princess donut and yeah of course princess donut uh and the fact that like
00:02:34.320we're even casually just referring to yeah a cat character grand champion best in dungeon princess
00:02:41.220donut yes her full name i i'm getting that off off the dome her highness uh we'll also talk a
00:02:47.860little bit about dungeon and dragons and that's why part of why we have melody here and essentially
00:02:53.340strong-armed her into finishing the first book before we recorded just remember like all bonus
00:02:59.460episodes. This is very off the cuff. We have like just a little bit of an organizational structure,
00:03:05.020but it is not as polished as our normal episodes. That also means that Melody doesn't have to spend
00:03:10.540a billion hours trying to make us sound like our most intelligent selves. So we sound like our like
00:03:15.520B plus selves. But first, let's start as we always do with a little bit of our priors or like
00:03:21.580setting the table for how far we've gone i am uh on book four which to me is quite impressive
00:03:29.900yeah i've read all of book one and the bonus thing and i've just barely started book two
00:03:37.680and you will be unsurprised to hear that i have them because my friend's boyfriend loaned them
00:03:44.520to me oh nice i was like i gotta find a copy of this and he was like oh my god i'll hook you up
00:03:49.640with the first two i think i would have read them faster if i had not had them in hardback
00:03:54.080yeah it's a heavy book in hardcover i think really meant for paperback or e-reader i'm
00:03:59.900reading them on an e-reader which is my preferred mode for the style of book not because i have
00:04:05.580anything no because i have any problem with genre fiction covers and actually they have made a very
00:04:12.680like esteemable or like almost literary cover for dungeon crawler carl um yeah it's more that this
00:04:20.200book is like when you're reading this fast you want to be able to access the next one yeah you
00:04:24.560want to be able to just suck it up with a big straw like one of the like boba tea straws yeah
00:04:29.560just want to like that which is exactly what i did yeah yeah i think that's the way it's meant
00:04:35.160to be? I, despite my real addiction to Star Trek The Next Generation and Star Trek The Next
00:04:43.060Generation novels when I was young, I am not a sci-fi reader in general. I am not a fantasy
00:04:51.240reader. I don't play video games. And I know a lot about D&D vis-a-vis other people in my life
00:04:59.400who played D&D, including the 12-year-old next door who talks to me, talks at me constantly
00:05:06.880about everything that he is obsessed with, with D&D.
00:05:11.240What is your relationship to this broader genre?
00:05:14.140It's actually a sub-genre, which is based on writing kind of fanfics, or not even fanfics,
00:05:19.800that's the wrong word, writing fics that expand sort of an RPG, a big role-player game world.
00:05:27.460And like a dungeon master in Dungeons and Dragons is kind of writing like a partially interactive fantasy novel.
00:05:34.760And I think these fics are basically like instead of letting the people at the table roll dice and make choices and things like that, you're just in addition to doing all of the scene setting, you're making all the decisions for the characters within the world.
00:05:46.800You kind of get to just bring all that power back into yourself.
00:05:51.100And we should also say that the author, Matt Dinneman, looks like the most Dungeon Master guy from the West Coast that I have personally ever seen.
00:06:02.660Like, just like how his images appear online.
00:06:05.740He feels very Tacoma, which is where he was living when he wrote these to me.
00:06:13.540um and he also started publishing them in 2020 online and then they eventually became like he
00:06:23.300collected them and then self-published them on amazon and then he sold part of the rights
00:06:28.340to an imprint of pangam random house and now i the fact that he sold a part of the rights like
00:06:36.880that's how it's referred to suggests to me that he is making a lot of money on these
00:06:42.540I suspect that that is correct. My only complaint about Matt Dinneman and his savvy sales of the rights is that the audiobook currently is an Amazon exclusive.
00:06:56.000And that's a bummer to me because I'd say short of an e-reader, I feel like the audiobook would really be an ideal way to consume this.
00:07:04.140But although, as we discussed, I still use Amazon Prime, I did wean myself off of Audible and switch over to, you know, it's indie competitor Libro FM.
00:07:42.480And the narrator is supposed to be really fantastic.
00:07:45.620It's supposed to be one of those people where it's like one person, but he does all of the voices, which is a genre of audio book narration that people will get really passionately excited about that for me is like a 50-50 hit or miss.
00:08:04.780What is my orientation to the sci-fi fantasy genre?
00:08:07.820uh if it is published for children or teenagers i read all of it up until i don't know
00:08:17.120probably 2012 like practically everything that's in that space from then because that was very much
00:08:22.800my genre when i was a kid got it uh when i was that age one reason why those genres appealed to
00:08:29.740me for younger readers and not necessarily for adult readers is because uh the ones for younger
00:08:35.340readers seem to have an understanding of female characters and readers with subjectivity rather
00:08:42.240than chiefly being objects. And that was really hit or miss in the sci-fi. Obviously, you have
00:08:49.760greats like Ursula K. Le Guin. No problem with female subjectivity there. But you also have1.00
00:08:56.280like, who's the guy? Robert Heinlein, who writes all the Martian books. And so because that genre
00:09:05.120was so dicey and mystery was so reliable that ended up being the direction that i went when i
00:09:11.500was reading books for grown-ups um and now uh it's not something that i do a lot of reading in but it
00:09:18.840is certainly a space where like if it hits it hits so hard for me yeah um and then there's a band
00:09:28.840where it's like well this isn't exactly what i love but i'm still really enjoying it and then
00:09:33.140And there's a lot where it's like, I know you love your world building, Tolkien, but I don't need to know about all 17 kinds, excuse me, like 74 different varieties of pipeweed cultivated by the hobbits in Middle Earth.
00:09:47.360Like, I don't need to know that much about the Shire.
00:09:50.500Like, the meme where it's like, I'm really happy for you or I'm really sorry all that happened to you, but I ain't reading all of that.
00:09:58.660That can definitely be my orientation to a lot of adult targeted fantasy novels and sci-fi novels because they love to show their work with the world building.
00:10:10.660I also love with world building, just the like the way that you're invited into this like other space that feels really inventive and like exploratory.
00:10:21.840and the very first for me the like the very first part of the introduction to it when it's done well
00:10:27.560it's just like delightful it's transportative and addictive and then I often find myself
00:10:35.700fatigued and I think I'm actually reaching that point right now on book four I find myself
00:10:41.680fatigued because I'm just like it's not as exciting anymore to me or like there have to be
00:10:47.020a lot of different kind of like band-aids put on to make the world like work and make it logical
00:10:54.960and one of the critiques of the book which we'll get to later on but one of the critiques of the
00:10:58.760book is that because it didn't have an editor from the beginning there are just some things that
00:11:04.080maybe like a really good editor could have helped with in terms of consistency language a couple of
00:11:10.720plot points but also just with like some fundamental world building stuff as well um but i wanted to
00:11:17.240ask melody what is what is your fantasy and sci-fi and dnt and everything take uh i've read a fair
00:11:28.680amount of fantasy i will say i tried to read fellowship of the ring a couple years ago and
00:11:34.100was stuck on the first 100 pages and then i was unable to read another book for six months
00:11:40.220So it did break me, and then I finally gave up.
00:11:45.040I have gotten a little more into sci-fi recently, and I'm enjoying it.
00:11:55.060I also play some video games that feel as though they are referenced or the book is inspired by them.
00:12:02.820So we should describe, the best that we're able, how this book works.
00:12:09.020And I don't mean to make it sound weird to people who have maybe read widely within this like subgenre of books that are kind of based on video games or like trying to recreate it.
00:12:20.600But for me personally, entering into this space, and I told Melody this when she first started reading, it's like it throws you out of the book almost immediately because you get kind of like messages from the game or from like how it works.
00:12:37.700But I should back up even more. The premise of the book is that a faraway corporation decided that it was going to colonize and like basically eliminate everything on Earth many, many years ago.
00:12:52.760They decided this and they like put the work in to figure out how they were going to do it.
00:12:58.320And one night at like 2.30 in the morning, anyone who was outdoors lived because the aliens did some sort of weird thing.
00:13:10.600Anyone who was outdoors lived and anyone who was indoors died.
00:13:15.240Yeah. In the act of reclaiming all of the minerals on Earth, which is what they were able to do, they sucked all of the buildings and structures down into the ground, collapsed them. So if you were inside a structure of any kind under a roof, you were basically smushed. And if you were outside or happened to be, then you survived. And then the next thing happens.
00:13:39.980And then you're invited to enter into these portals that put you into essentially like a giant game.
00:13:50.200It's a subterranean, complicated maze where you fight weird goblins and monsters, many of whom are an amalgam of creatures and pop culture things from Earth, but also creatures and pop culture things from other planets.
00:14:12.200Because this is all also televised for the wider universe.
00:14:19.640So the Beyond Earth and Earth's universe people are all watching and consuming the action. It's one of like many planets have been treated this way. Every time a planet is treated this way, it is televised.
00:14:34.980And actually the money for the people running these things is not actually in the mineral reclamation, but it's in the spectacle that is created by sending this small group of survivors into this incredibly sadistic and weird mini maze where they compete against each other in like the most dangerous game kind of way.
00:15:04.020Yeah. Where like only a limited number of people can survive.
00:15:11.560Teaming up and making community is a very dicey prospect, etc.
00:15:15.680But also essential. Right. And this is like I one of the reviews that we'll talk about later says that this is like one of the least lonely iterations of like a fantasy novel, really, or sci-fi novel.
00:15:29.080And crucial to that is our protagonist, Carl, who is outside at 2 in the morning to rescue this prize show cat.
00:15:42.500His ex-girlfriend's, his recently ex-girlfriend's prize show cat, Princess Donut.
00:15:47.820Princess Donut. And for reasons that aren't entirely scrutable, Princess Donut becomes a speaking entity when she enters the game.
00:15:59.120But then there are dogs that also enter the game that don't become speaking entities.
00:16:03.940She gets some kind of magical item that she eats that makes her speak and turns her into a player in the game rather than a pet of Carl.
00:16:14.040Yeah. Don't worry, there are other pets involved. But the other thing, too, is the way that this is written is you're constantly getting sort of the omniscient narrator or sometimes like Carl's perspective of what's going on, like his internal understanding of everything that's going on.
00:16:32.580But then also you're getting a ton of text that he is essentially getting beamed into his brain from the computer, right?
00:16:40.880From the computer that is running this competition.
00:17:31.200Yes. And sometimes that humor is very effective and other times it's not as effective. And I think that's intentional. Like some of the things hit and some of the things are just like, ugh.
00:17:42.060Right. And that's always the defense, I think, of some of the things that come up in these levels in like the plot and all of this sort of thing is like, you're like, oh, that's kind of misogynist. And you're like, well, it's because the A.I. has fed on all of our misogynist culture. And like whether that's an appropriate defense or not, but I think we can argue about.