The pace of the novel is quick and it has some very steady beats until near the end. When a book takes you across the universe to spend time with weird and hilarious extraterrestrials, it feels like hitting a speedbump to settle down at the end and resolve a conflict centered on legal interpretations of the law.
Despite these minor hiccups, Year Zero is still a good read and an easy sell. It is just the right kind of zany, often inventive, and does an excellent job of satirizing the particular brand of crazy we call modern life (and the particular legal insanity thereof).
We need more of this. Not necessarily a sequel, I mean, but more humorous fiction. I recommend reading this book for its own merits, but also in the hope that strong sales for Year Zero will mean a market more friendly to humorous sci-fi in the future. If anything, the future will be just too absurd to take seriously, and that’s no fiction.
Dan Hope, or the BSR as we call him, is Fiction Vortex’s managing editor and resident sci-fi go to guy. Whether he is writing it or reading it, sci-fi is his thing. Yes, he has an opinion about which Star Trek captain is the best. And yes, he will fight you about it. Dan recently moved to one of the sunny regions of California. He periodically feels pangs of regret that he doesn’t write as much as he used to, but he consoles himself with beaches and fantastic weather.
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The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination
An anthology edited by John Joseph Adams
Review by Dan Hope
The idea of mad scientists seems so overdone, like an old relic of serials from the Cold War era, which is why it was so surprising to see such nuance in a new anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, called The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination.
The obvious expectation is a bunch of short stories about white-haired men in lab coats, cackling and rubbing their hands nefariously over a workbench covered in bubbling vials. There are a few of those in here, but the authors have given us a surprisingly wide variety of characters, goals, and motivations. Sure, there are guys, but there are also good guys with good intentions gone wrong, normal guys who are misunderstood, geniuses with broken hearts or broken minds, even children who don’t understand their own power. Another laudable choice was to include stories where the mad scientist is a woman, instead of the traditional stereotype.
A refreshing aspect of the anthology is the variety of story forms. There’s the traditional tale of world domination, told in third person. But there are also stories that use flashbacks, or unreliable narrators, or multiple twists to keep things interesting. In fact, one the most delightful stories is told in the form of an itemized list. Trust me, it works.
To Adams credit, the stories form a nice ebb and flow. He has ordered them so that one particular trope or writing style doesn’t get too repetitive. Humor is interspersed with drama. Large plans of world domination are separated by more introspective, personal tales. And despicable protagonists are tempered with more lovably mad scientists.
The difficulty in reviewing an anthology such as this is that the quality of writing varies from story to story. The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination is no exception, although it’s worth saying that the low points are few and far between here. And they’re also not all that low. A few stories suffer from a slightly tortured premise or an unusual detour, but for the most part they are all well written and utterly compelling.
Such quality shouldn’t be so surprising. Adams has managed to pull together stories from some famous and up-and-coming authors in the science fiction and fantasy world, including David Farland, Mary Robinette Kowal, L.E. Modesitt Jr., Naomi Novik, Austin Grossman, Seanan McGuire, and many more.
The greatest benefit of an anthology, and this one in particular, is that you can get a large variety of hilarious situations, fascinating characters, intriguing ideas, and compelling plots. But perhaps the largest difficulty in reading this anthology is that there will inevitably be characters that you don’t want to let go. I promise you will want to read an entire novel about some of these mad scientists. But it’s not a bad problem to have, and Adams has certainly given us an anthology that will have you saying, “I’ll read just one more. It’s only 2 a.m.”
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About Fiction Vortex
Fiction Vortex, let’s see …
A fiction vortex is a tornado of stories that pick you up and hurl you through a barn to find enlightenment on the other side. It’s a whirlpool of fascinating tales so compelling that they suck you in, drag you down to the bottom of your mind, and drown you with incessant waves of glorious imagery and believable characters.
Nope.
A fiction vortex is an online speculative fiction magazine focused on publishing great science fiction and fantasy, and is run by incredibly attractive and intelligent people with great taste in literature and formidable writing prowess.
Not that either. But we’re getting closer.
Founded in the 277th year of the Takolatchni Dynasty, Fiction Vortex set out to encourage people to write and publish great speculative fiction. It sprang fully formed from the elbow of TWOS, retaining none of TWOS’s form but most of its spirit. And the patron god of writers, the insecure, the depressed, and the mentally ill regarded Fiction Vortex in his magic mirror of self-loathing and declared it good, insofar as something that gives writer’s undue hope can be declared good. Thereafter, he charged the Rear Admiral of the Galactic 5th Fleet to defend Fiction Vortex down to the last robot warrior.
Now we’re talking.
Take your pick. We don’t care how you characterize us or the site.
Fiction Vortex focuses on publishing speculative fiction. That means science fiction and fantasy (with a light smattering of horror and a few other subgenres), be it light, heavy, deep, flighty, spaceflighty, cerebral, visceral, epic, or mundane. But mundane in a my-local-gas-station-has-elf-mechanics-but-it’s-not-really-a-big-deal-around-here kind of way. Got it?
Basically, we want imaginative stories that are well written, but not full of supercilious floridity.
There’s a long-standing belief that science fiction and fantasy stories aren’t as good as purely literary fare. We want you to prove that mindset wrong (not just wrong, but a steaming pile of griffin dung wrong) with every story we publish. It’s almost like we’re saying, “I do not bite my thumb at you, literary snobs, but I do bite my thumb,” but in a completely polite and non-confrontational way.
We've got more great stories online, with a new story twice a week. Visit our website FictionVortex.com, follow us on Twitter: @FictionVortex, and like us on Facebook: FictionVortex.
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