Robb Irrgang
This is an insanely frustrating book to write about. Almost as frustrating as a five point scale, since this is more of a 2.5 than a 2.
There are a lot of great ideas in this book—and they're surrounded by swamps of prose. Weeks after going through the early chapters—still firmly set in ‘meatspace'—I'm starting to wonder if, despite avoiding reporting on misinformation online because it was stressing me out, I do actually want to make a ‘REMEMBER MOAB' sticker. There's genuine ideas here that are fucking clever, and then...swamp. “Dodge spending 45 minutes of reading getting out of bed” swamp. Quest swamp. Wing swamp.
I ate up all the real world stuff like it was candy. When the book, about halfway through, upped it's storytelling of ‘Bitworld' stuff, things got a lot harder. This book took me forever and I'm gonna have to be honest, the last few hours of the ‘Quest' storyline...I skimmed it. I wanted the meat of the story and not the meandering around it.
At the same time, certain plot points inside the swamp (okay, fine, I'll stop beating the metaphor to death) just don't make sense. Meatworld has insight into Bitworld through a much-described viewer and should be able to see that, once the Big Bad takes over, there's NO REASON AT ALL that they'd want to keep uploading their consciousnesses into Bitworld. But somehow, they keep going?
Dodge in Hell is a collection of really, really good ideas, and overly wordy execution. If the ideas weren't as good as they were, I wouldn't have finished—Stephenson is this clever. But he also needs an editor or picky friend to challenge him, because at the end of the day...well ...something something swamp. See, I'm not clever like Neal.
Middlegame was stellar, probably one of my favorite things I read in...whatever year I read it in. Time's broken, gang. It's a whole thing.
I enjoyed this book a good amount but it didn't check all my boxes the way Middlegame did. Structurally the actual contest/maze bit felt short and incomplete, and the appearances of you-know-who and you-know-who from book 1 felt a little fan-servicy and not that important to the book (but...it might set up future books?).
I'm sure it's hard to write a follow-up a great book, and this is still a good book. But it's no Middlegame.
I'm going to admit that while I was both blown away by HoX/PoX and Hickman's work on the X-books since, Inferno, to me, started strong and ended with a whimper.
I'm assuming Hickman was kind of checked out after he decided it leave. Inferno threw a Big Idea out there (time travel within Moira's Xth lifetime creating a second timeline) and then...just kinda flailed for a bit. So in a way, at least half of this book appearing to continue the weaker part of Inferno (turn Moira into a cliche villain) set the expectation that I might not like this book.
Meanwhile, Percy's runs on Wolverine and X-Force were solid— I enjoyed his style and whole I don't think all the stories were super interesting, there was a plan there.
This arc, meanwhile, has him going hog wild, replicating the HoX/PoX structure to tell...a very, very messy story. Wolverine is traveling in time! How? Don't worry about it. Why? Because Omega Red is out there trying to kill the Xavier clan in many eras because...reasons.
If you like seeing Omega Red fight, boy, have we got a book for you here. Including him possessing a genuine gosh-darn whale while trying to kill, I guess, great-grandpa X or something.
If you want things to make—or rather, feel like they make sense, a vibe Hickman pulled off quite well, that course is sadly missing. Here, have some more Omega Red instead. Or maybe some Future Wolverine. He fights for pages and pages, too, and seems to want to be a retcon of a few amazing details in HoX/PoX.
Amazing world building, but somehow doesn't deliver the punchline that other Stephenson books do after all that work.