2/5, bad
We read this in our book club this month and the consensus was that this is a fun, but not very smart, book. I personally didn’t enjoy it very much. I read very slow whether I’m reading something complicated or something simple because I’m used to reading for nuance. There is not a lot of nuance in this book, that’s for sure. At its heart, it’s the basic white-male power fantasy that we’ve been reading a lot in our scifi club, and honestly it’s starting to get a little old.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Off to Be the Wizard is about a just-out-of-college kid named Martin who works at a boring cubicle IT job. One night, while messing around hacking the AT&T database, Martin happens upon The File. When Martin makes changes to the file, things change in real life. For example, he can add inches to his height or thousands of dollars to his bank account.
The characters in Off to Be a Wizard, which is the first book in the Magic 2.0 series, don’t spend much time engaging with the implications of their world being a computer simulation (except for the villain, who uses it as an excuse for bad behavior). It functions more as a set-up for the magical system and the fictional world, and the question of who wrote the file is never addressed (another member of our group has read the whole series of 5 books).
Anyway, Martin adds money to his bank account, gets in trouble with the Feds, and decides to escape to medieval England because that’s the time and place you think of when you think of magic, if you’re a white American. Fortunately, Martin finds a cadre of other American tech geeks who found The File and are now living as wizards (using different types of computers to access it, including a Commodore 64).
What follows is a humorous but predictable story wherein the main character gets mentored in his new powers, beats the bad guy, and (almost) gets the girl.
My main issue with this book is with how “bro-y” it is. Almost every character is a white male, and most of the scenes and interactions between characters seem like they’d fit better into a D&D game or fraternity house than a scifi/fantasy novel. A lot of time is spent just hanging out, learning new tricks, and playing practical jokes on each other. The middle of the book contains almost no plot movement, it’s just Martin and his mentor Philip learning how to use new spells/commands. The whole middle section, from the time Martin lands back in the 12th century to the time we meet the main antagonist, is just painfully boring. I almost set the book down so many times, but I liked the premise so much I forced myself to keep reading.
I don’t regret finishing it because the end was fun, but the thing as a whole was just so mediocre. The author is in his 40s and the character is supposed to be a modern day millennial (23 in 2014, when the book was published), but ALL of the references were from the 80s (except for Harry Potter). Warning: spoilers, but Martin’s macro (his big entrance as a wizard) is of a giant version of himself breakdancing, doing the robot, and the worm to Herbie Hancock’s 1984 hit “Rockit”, which is so dated I’ve never heard of it and the whole climactic scene just comes off like a dad trying too hard to look cool.
Also, this book has… not one… not two… but 3! Different! Kinds! Of! Token! Characters! There’s Gwen, who’s the only female wizard from the future in their medieval town. Every male wizard who has come back in time asks her out (despite not knowing she’s a wizard/witch, apparently, even though it’s obvious to the readers). Seriously. Every. One. And she turns them all down because they’re all creepy, entitled assholes. But Martin will be different! (no he won’t… he’s just as bad as them. Still somehow she warms up to him by the end, because he’s the main character and she’s the only attractive woman in the whole book, so *of course* they have to get together, her initial resistance nonwithstanding).
What’s more frustrating about this is that the author is trying to be woke by portraying Martin as being gross for continuing to pursue her despite her disinterest, yet Meyer clearly still plans to “reward” him with her at the end of the series. At the end of this book, Gwen’s cover is blown (the medieval ages are hostile to witches, so she was keeping her powers a secret) and she has to run away to Atlantis, which is a society run by women hackers who found The File (and I’m guessing is probably similar to the female-run society in Rick & Morty, judging by Philip’s comment “Go to see a society governed by women who whose to go somewhere we weren’t? No, we’ve never sent anyone to go look around. We’re afraid we might not like what we find.” Why are female-run societies so often portrayed as authoritarian dystopias?). In the next book, apparently Martin and Philip go to Atlantis… for some reason… which is definitely not to chase Gwen… *awkward wink* Ugh.
There’s also a token black character, Tyler, who brushes off questions about racism in the middle ages with “They ask about it, but I tell them that I’m Moorish. They assume either I’ve been converted to Christianity, so I’m harmless, or I’m dangerous enough to survive in this country as a heathen. Either way, it ends the conversation.” Then he disappears and doesn’t come back until the very end of the book.
The token Asian character, Wing Po (real name Eddie), does subvert stereotypes a little bit with his New Jersey accent, but he’s relegated to being the antagonist’s assistant (and then Martin’s assistant once he beats the antagonist – ugh!).
I think Scott Meyer is sort of aware of social justice issues, and he’s very aware that his story is super white and super male, but he kind of stops at awareness instead of doing anything to change it. He kind of makes a nod to how exclusive the boys’ club is and then continues writing an almost-all white male cast. I think if, instead of making 3 token characters, he made one fully fleshed-out central character that wasn’t white or wasn’t male, it would have been much less boring and aggravating.
Even the main characters were still pretty flat. Martin was hard to sympathize with because he was so arrogant and stupid, so it was hard to care what happened to him, which made it challenging to keep reading. Philip was the most well-rounded character, but he was just a regular, decent human being. Gwen wasn’t terrible, and her lines were mostly believable, but she got so little active time that she barely counts. All the other characters were totally one-dimensional. I don’t think any characters changed at all over the course of the novel. I get that this is kind of an episodic, action-based series, so it goes light on theme, but you still need characters you don’t mind spending tie with.
I had high expectations for this book, but it really let me down. I didn’t even think most of the jokes were funny. There’s a plenty of sarcasm and crude humor, but no absurdist humor or clever wit. I honestly can’t believe this was published in 2014. It seems like a cheap scifi spin-off of the MythAdventures series by Robert Lynn Asprin which were mostly published in the 1980s.
I do notice this has a lot of 5s on Goodreads and received a lot of 3s and 4s in my book group, so I may just be no fun, but this was so not my cup of tea. 😛
I think you could actually use this in a gender studies class to exemplify how male-dominated spaces can feel hostile to women, so I will definitely bookmark it for that in case I end up teaching sociology or gender studies in the future…
Anyway, I’ll leave you with a question to think about:
Why are wizards respectable and witches scary?
Post a Comment