I first came across Mel Croucher when i was a spotty teenager, hunched over a mechanical keyboard. To be more precise, I came across The Pi Man in Crouchers computer came PiMania. It was a curious game with no traditional ending. Instead, it was a series of clues which would lead to the discovery of the "Golden Sundial of Pi."

In actual fact, it did really exist and two women solved the puzzle and won the prize. The sundial was made of gold and worth six thousand great british notes, back in the eighties. That's a ton of money back then. It would pay for a family car and then leave you enough for a few hundred bottles of wine.

 

I stumbled across Croucher again because I'm a retro gamer. Now older and slightly less wiser, I read up on his history and how it collided with the popularisation and commercialisation of the home computer industry.

 

The more I read about Mel, the more I got this image of a fun guy who didn't take himself too seriously and actually had a genuine love for life and creation. The game Deus Ex Machina isn't so much a game but more an artistic endeavour merged with a bit of a challenge and... well, it's unique. You can actually see it being played along with its star studded soundtrack on YouTube if you're lucky enough to find it. We're talking Ian Drury, John Pertwee and Frankie Howard among the names.

 

This game was set to go head to head with the gaming industry and Mel certainly has a lot to say about it. I'm hoping to gather another insight from the period that I grew up in, but didn't know how ignorant I was of... by reading this book.

 

The physical thing is on its way to me. In the mean time, I'm reading the section on Amazon, and this is typical of Croucher's humour...

 

The Worker Who Married Me had been teaching English to groups of men with multi-coloured beards and surrealist headwear, and when we arrived back in the UK we had the notion to enhance my new multimedia business and her teaching career by becoming failed antiques dealers. I would go and buy things I liked, such as wax-cylinder phonograph machines and vintage typewriters, and spend lots of time repairing them for sale.Then she would calculate the hours and effort involved and tell me how much loss I had made. It was an interesting business model that I would use again in my video game career. By the time she brought home and educational brochure about an electronic brain in a tin box from her place of work, I was ready to roll. This little computer was the size of a suitcase and it didn't use punch-cards for storing stuff, it fed on magnetic tape! What's more, the tape was housed in standard cassettes just like the ones I had used for my Dubai travel guides.

 

This is promising to be a good read.

Three major points of criticism:

 

1. Bechdel Test Fail

Up to about two-thirds, there weren't ANY women in this book. After that there were three: One scolding her husband for putting their son at risk, one serving her husband a meal and telling him everything would be okay when he was in a bad mood, and a third one offering the protagonist her little son in exchange for ammunition (iirc). Oh, and not to forget, there was the diary of a dead woman that was read by the (male) protagonist.

As you can see, women really played an important role in this story. Miserably failed.

 

2. Extreme overuse of Dei Ex Machina

Whenever the protagonist found himself in danger, suddenly a total stranger (or a group of them) appeared out of nowhere to help him: When he wanted to leave a station, when he wanted to enter another station without having the proper papers, when a station was attacked, when he got lost in the tunnels, when he was captured... Every. Freaking. Time.

 

3. Falling short of expectations

You would think that the setting of this book would make for a pretty creepy read - Moscow's metro system after an apocalypse, its stations inhabited by only a few surviving humans, surrounded by mutants on the surface that are always about to attack, also frightening beings in the tunnels and malevolent groups supervising certain stations - but it doesn't. There was solely one scene in the whole book that I found a bit scary, that's all.

 

Oh, and the resolution wasn't ingenious either.

 

Two stars for the unique setting and because it wasn't completely boring.

If there's one thing, one plot element, that Morrison is famous for, it's here, in the on-the-page meeting of Animal Man and Grant Morrison. Everything, it seems, was working towards that moment, when the fourth wall abruptly ceased to exist entirely. It could have been gimmicky, but Morrison managed to pair that with a storyline about characters I actually cared about and were invested in. So when Buddy looks directly off the page and into the eyes of the reader? If you're invested enough, absorbed enough, care enough, it will give you a chill. It got me. It wasn't the last time in this book, either. The thing is, I really liked Buddy and his family, and the twists their story took were heart breaking.

There are faults, of course. The very Morrison fault of brilliant concepts presented as finished stories, which I expect. The meeting between Buddy and Morrison was a little underwhelming, too, though the background action added a surreal weight to Morrison's animal rights lecture. (And yes, although Buddy's newfound animal rights activism was Morrison putting his opinions in Buddy's mouth, they also make perfect sense for the character.) The art, too, is unremarkable. But there's such a solid core of decent metafiction and really great characters that I entirely forgive Morrison, this time.

AH AH AH AH, MUERO DE AMOR. *________________* Deseando ponerme manos a la obra y escribir la reseña. Un hip hip hurra por la autora.

I couldn't stick with it after Sarah Palin was introduced to the plot, I grew weary. Sorry Mr. Altschul.