Liz Cultivates | L.M. Fern

I recently read Wild Massive by Scotto Moore. Published by Tor Books in 2023, Wild Massive is not what I would call a fantasy novel, or science fiction. More science fantasy. The publisher’s description is especially fun, so here it is:

Scotto Moore’s Wild Massive is a glorious web of lies, secrets, and humor in a breakneck, nitrous-boosted saga of the small rejecting the will of the mighty.

Some mild spoilers ahead!

The world in this book is huge, engaging, and mysterious. The story begins inside an elevator, where a character interacts with a robotic AI to move up and down floors. You quickly learn that this isn’t an elevator from any world we know. It is traveling via one of four shafts that exist in a massive building. In fact, this structure is so gargantuan — and encompasses basically the entire known universe — that it is given the proper noun treatment: The Building consists of tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of floors, each of which contain a distinct world. For instance, there are floors called “Earth floors” that each seem to contain all of Earth, with different dimensional characteristics in each discrete floor.

Each floor has five entrance points into the Building outside: four shaft entrances where you can board an elevator, and one fire exit (although the existence of the fire exit is mostly suspected to be myth). Only ‘enlightened’ floors that have discovered their elevators — and thus their existence in this huge Building — are available for travel.

And, of course, there is an oppressive government structure called the Association that governs the first ten thousand or so floors of the Building. The Association is comprised of various peoples, not just humanoids, of varying abilities and histories. They are led by a Parliament.

The story centers around a few characters who operate on the periphery of the Parliament and the Association: Carissa, who is the last member of a race of magic-users that disappeared violently (perhaps at the hands of the Association) a hundred years ago; Rindasy, a powerful magic user from a race of humanoids from one of the upper floors of the Building who are in talks to join the Association now (and it’s going poorly); and Tabitha, a narrative designer for the big corporate media propaganda piece for the Association, Storm and Desire. Each of these characters has a part to play in the larger narrative, in every sense of that word (the narrative of the media piece, of the book itself, of the history of the Building…).

We learn that the Building was constructed by a group of beings called Muses, at the direction of separate entities called Architects. There is an air of legend around these circumstances; the creation myth of the Muses seems at times to be just that, a myth, and other times it’s presented as historical fact. The way the information about the Muses is unraveled is fun, mysterious, and well-constructed.

All of this is to say…

I enjoyed this book immensely. I am not in the business of giving ratings, but if I were, I would probably give it a 4.5/5 just for the worldbuilding alone. I was pulled in immediately and didn’t want to leave when it ended. Highly recommend!