Book Review: Dragon Hack

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Hey everybody! It’s time for another of my meandering book reviews, where I pull apart some of the stuff I liked and found issues with in an indie book I’ve recently read. The last book review I did on this site was quite some time ago, but I only feature indie books on this site, and much of my recent books haven’t been indie.

Also, a reminder here, I don’t put scores on my book reviews here on my site. If you want some kind of score then go to any other of a number of websites to have options boiled into numerical form. And while I will be a bit more critical with this book, keep in mind, I only review books I feel it worth the effort to review; meaning at the end of the day, I liked it.

So, let’s get started with our review of Dragon Hack by Andrew Seiple.

Characters:

As always I start my inspection of a work with the characters of the story, the most important part of the book for me. And right off the bat here I ran into some serious friction points. First impressions are important in a book, and we are introduced to the main character, Richard Royal, in some unfavorable ways. He’s a depressed teen with an extremely poor self-image and a one-track mind focused on sex. Having lived through my teenage years, I can recognize how the hormone cocktail of youth tends to skew your thoughts to your new reproductive capabilities, but such an overt focus does nothing to make the main character likable.

Now this introduction is spurred on by Richard’s friend, who has a similar singular focus on intercourse solely for personal gratification. Then another character is added, who openly mocks and antagonizes Richard, spurring a social fight. It should be noted that this third character is supposed to be a youth mentor of sorts, but is actually a bully who extorts money from the poor. This is all to say that not only is it difficult to connect or empathize with the character of Richard, but the people who interact with him do nothing to help this problem.

In fact, throughout the book there are numerous characters who go out of their way to marginalize or antagonize the main character. For me, it got to the point where I was hoping for an ending where everyone dies in the end because I wanted to be rid of these people. His father is an abusive caricature

who treats his only child with open animus and the emotional core of the family, his mother, is quickly removed from the picture.

The only character that I found any connection with was Geebo, the draggit servant of Richard’s alter-ego. Unfortunately, this character only plays a small functional role in the story. In Geebo alone do we find a character who does not have an ulterior motive to manipulate Richard for their own selfish purposes, everyone else treats him like a tool or a punching bag, which is quite tiring.

It bears mentioning that Richard’s alter-ego has a sort of personality of his own, when not controlled by Richard. This personality is a character in their own right, and tries to personify a typical fantasy dragon. However, I kept scratching my head at the idea of a creature fully one day old having the sort of mental faculties to grasp language, draconic society, and its supposed place in the world. There is some interesting background that talks about how it was taught via songs while gestating in an egg, but I felt it insufficient to explain his personality. I only consider this a minor gripe though, as the dragon’s assumptions is one of the best sources of humor in the book.

Plot:

This story boils down to a fairly basic story of kid trying to deal with a difficult life by seeking refuge in video games. Add in a dash of corrupt theocracies, digital-equivalents of dark gods, and dystopian politics, and you have the astringent flavor of this story. The problem with the plot is the protagonists problems are neatly tied up at the end of the book through little intervention on his own part. So, at the end of the story I got the feeling that Richard was more of a passenger in his own life rather than the driver.

So much of what the main character does is a reaction of another character, and we have little opportunity to see him act proactively, or with his own agency.

The progression of the story is more enjoyable when in the game world of Generica Online, but still consists of Richard’s struggle to get through setting up his glitched character. There were several time I anticipated the protagonist to ‘hack’ or interact with the code structure of the game world, but it rarely happened, despite multiple people saying how gifted a programmer he was. Most of his interaction in the game world consists of stumbling through the mechanics of the game world, and I thought it would be more fun to see him hack the game more often. I mean, the word hack is in the title, after all.

A final note about the plot is that there is something supremely confusing about the progression of this book. It takes place over the span of a few days, and the main character hardly sleeps through this time. There is a mechanic that I won’t spoil in this review, that inadvertently keeps his body going when he doesn’t intend it. I kept scratching my head and wondering when the physical exhaustion of his body’s wakefulness would overcome him, but it didn’t for one reason or another.

Setting:

Here’s the part of the book I had the most issue with. The world of Generica Online was the same world that readers are used to from reading the Threadbare and Small Medium series, no problems there. But the ‘real world’ where Richard lives is so hopeless that I found myself groaning when we had to revisit it. To put it bluntly, it’s a hyperbolic dystopia that tries to envision the polarization of society overriding social order.

The country that Richard lives in is a Theocratic state that is based on fundamentalist Christian ideas. The author knew that such commentary would be divisive to the point that the very first thing you read in the story was a disclaimer about the religious references. He says his setting is not based on Christian religious belief, but rather uses it as a mechanism to convey oppression. To that end he uses it as a crutch, and it functions about as well as a pillow when you put some weight on it.

If he wanted to create something that truly had nothing to do with the Christian religion, then why did he feel compelled to mention Christianity to begin with? I agree with him, in that his depiction has nothing to do with the religion, but rather uses its edifices and constructs to create a totalitarian state. But I very much question why go to the effort to mention Christianity if it doesn’t have much to do with it? If the goal was some kind of snarky criticism of the evangelical church, played for laughs, I think it failed.

Other countries were likewise abstracted here. You have to be polite in EastCan (Canada) or you’ll be exiled. I’ve had coworkers and bosses from Canada, and I can attest that they were not polite and clean-mouthed people by any stretch of the imagination. Any Canadian I’ve met would struggle to go one sentence without sprinkling their speech with profanity. In Cascadia (which I believe is west coast USA) social media determines your standing in society, and everyone lives an artificial life in pursuit of likes and retweets. Again, if these were put in the story for a laugh, it fell flat with me.

In fact, I found myself drawing comparisons with the settings in the books of Awaken Online and Ready Player One. It felt like the author pulled the detached parents and horrible school life from Awaken Online and the dystopia, post-climate-change world from Ready Player One into a miserable amalgam. For me, the settings from these novels are some of the worst part of their respective stories, and I didn’t like seeing them reappear in Dragon Hack.

Overall, I feel disappointed by the setting of this book. In the author’s other stories, he put forth the effort to craft interesting settings with respect and interest of other cultures. But here, we see a series of cheap pot-shots that come off as pop-culture over-generalizations that chafe against the sort of care shown in the other books.

Final thoughts:

On the whole I feel that my impression was that of disappointment. Andrew Seiple is one of my favorite indie authors, and someone who I look towards for inspiration in my own writing. When a new book of his is released I jump at the opportunity to dive into his world and throw his stuff at the top of my reading list.

Perhaps my issue with this book is within me; that the book wasn’t written for me. However, it’s my hope that this was a stumbling point, and the humor and intelligent writing that shone in his previous books will come back, and that I’m perhaps missing something important in this story. I want to like this book, because it’s part of the world and saga of the Generica Online series, and it’s a series that I’m invested in. I’m not going to stop reading this trilogy because of one book, but my expectations have been tempered by this novel, unfortunately.

Recomended for: Avid readers of the Threadbare and Small Medium trilogies. Litrpg fans.

Avoid if: Christian totalitarianism upsets you or makes you uncomfortable, if the dystopia in Ready Player One was a big turn-off, or if the poor personal circumstances from Awaken Online rub you the wrong way.