Just didn’t enjoy this. The tone starts out playful and funny, kind of post apocalyptic blade-runner-y. But then you’re plunged into endless scifi politics stuff and I hated it. Less exposition and more fun banter would have made this a winner.

5.0 / 10 ✪

https://arefugefromlife.wordpress.com/2023/05/21/wild-massive-by-scotto-moore-review/

Okay, so this one is nuts. I mean, if you read the description or any kind of sample, this shouldn’t surprise you. From the blurb alone, it sounds insane. The only question is: is it a good or bad insane? Well, I’m here to tell you… it may not be bad, but it’s certainly not good. It’s just too much.

We have two shapeshifters, a psychic, a teenager that can see the future, and an all-out war between the Association and the Shai-Manak. A Wild Massive theme-park with magic and rides based on the past and future, and a propensity to stick-it to the man. Oh, and the Explorer’s Guild is trying to make it to the Top Floor, to explore and map the Chasm and contact the entity that resides there. And all of this happens <i>before</i> shit really goes sideways.

It turns out there are Muses that guide the course of the future of the Building. A Management that technically guides and controls the Muses. A magic system that was impossible to predict, let alone understand. A thrilling conclusion that I had to read twice, but still didn’t make any damned sense.

Seriously there’s so much going on in this that it’s easy to lose any concept of what’s going on. And lose it I did. I’m not really sure when and where, exactly, but lose it I did, so that I was almost completely lost by the time I reached the end. An ending that I actually read three times, a conclusion I read twice, and then skipped around a bit in a desperate attempt to make any sense of it all. Which, I did, after some time.

The problem is, while it may actually make some kind of sense at the end, it certainly doesn’t seem in any way fulfilling. Seriously, upon preparing this review I reread the conclusion <i>AGAIN</i> and my continued reaction to it was “WTF did I just read???”

The story wasn’t actually bad to this point, however. It was actually rather adventurous and unique (very unique), wild and crazy, exciting and… crazy. Interesting and immersive—until it wasn’t.

Other than the obvious confusion, my main problem was that once I finally lost track of what was happening—I just didn’t care. About the story, the conclusion, what happened or might happen. I couldn’t figure everything out, but just couldn’t summon enough energy to care.

Audio Note: Suzy Jackson, as always, made an impressive attempt to keep me invested. She even managed it for a while. Through the entirety of the book, once. Through all the madness and mayhem. Through several attempts to understand the conclusion, through several additional attempts to figure out just what had happened at the end. Keep having her narrate things—she’s awesome!

Wild Massive is a multi-dimensional story primarily about the Building, a skyscraper where each floor is a different dimension. Many are Earth dimensions, but many aren't.

We follow a handful of characters as they participate in the latter portions of the Building's history, somewhat literally, as the format of this book is set up as episodes of the longest-running TV show in the Building, which tells the history of said building's inhabitants and their interactions.

Oh, and Wild Massive is a massive network of theme parks, spread across multiple floors, where magic, technology, and more combine.

Wild Massive takes a little while to get going, honestly, but once that groundwork is laid down and the story truly opens up, it takes on a life of its own and excels at nearly everything a book is supposed to do.

Do yourself a favor and read what might be one of the more unique SFF books this year.

The book felt unbalanced between a dry account of a "currently happening" thing that feels like a historical event and a rather irreverent character who is quite possibly going to stage a rebellion or coup but right now is just casually at a theme park. At the 20% mark, it truly felt like we hadn't gotten anywhere - and this book isn't particularly short.

And then we introduce our narrator who gives a lengthy and infodumpy self-introduction and we STILL haven't really gotten to the why or even what of anything. We get the longterm goals (well, more of just general ill will) rather than an actionable plan or at least a sense of urgency. It felt like I hadn't accomplished anything even though I'd spent a few hours listening.

Wild Massive Book Review @scottomoore @TorDotComPub #WildMassive #scottomoore #SuzyJackson #BookReview#Review #MacmillianPublishers #TorPublishing #ScienceFiction #SpaceOpera #NetGalley #Cherry_LA#CherryLosAngeles

The beginning was absolutely intriguing but soon it goes into an in-depth explanation of Wild Massive, where the story lost me. I gave another try to finish but after giving more than 100 pages, I couldn't get into it. I really wish I could say differently about this book but unfortunately wasn't my cup of tea.

The craziest premisse ever: a building Containing a multiverse of worlds linked by elevators that you can use to get to these worlds and a chain of famous roller coasters parks.

THIS BOOK IS A MESS. BUT THE BEST OF THEM.
Carissa, Andasir, Rindsay and Tabitha are some characters that cross paths multiple times on this incredible story about Destiny. Their are not your tipical main character without flaws but make decisions and have to live with them or have already suffer from some of them.
This narrative gonna mix, like gods figures, powers that are beyond your wild imaginations, concepts about reality ,incredible alien cultures and the power of a history in a way that fans of tv shows gonna be crazy about it. It's a massive story narrated in an incredibly different way from anything I've ever read that it will take time to put all the pieces on the board, introducing us without haste their characters and their personal stories to then converge everything in one place just for them to interact and finally make a really innovatively scifi world.

I loved the premise of this book and the first chapter had me very intrigued. But it started going downhill soon after and it became a real chore to continue. I really wanted to like it but was bothered by it all too much to continue. Sadly it was a DNF for me.

First I want to thank NetGalley and RB Media for providing me with an advance copy of this Audiobook.

Wild Massive is a very accurate title for the latest book by Scotto Moore. Just wrapping your mind around the world it's set in takes some doing. Wild Massive takes place inside a Multiverse spanning building. Each world takes up a single floor and there are elevators that traverse the hundreds of thousands of floors. The title of the book comes from a series of theme parks that can take up entire floors of the building. The story itself is a bit tongue in cheek and felt a bit like the tone of a Terry Pratchett novel and it has elements of sci-fi and fantasy with mind bending tech, psionic warriors, and shape shifting wizards. Accompanied by an absolutely amazing narrator for this audiobook there are a lot of great things to enjoy about Wild Massive.

The big hang-up that I had with the book was with just how big it is. In order to try and get the reader around all the nuances of the fantastic world there are a number of sections that felt like the reader is being told how to experience the world instead of letting some of that happen naturally within dialogue and character development. This makes the early chapters of the book feel a bit sluggish on pace even though there are also a number of side-stories that are taking place. There is also a point in the book where the narrative style changes perspective. I know some people are grinding their teeth even thinking about changing narrative style mid book , but it happens and though it was jarring it made since to change perspective in the story.

I saw a lot of reviews that couldn't really get past the opening chapters of this book and I can understand why they might think that. However, the story idea is so creative and I kept wanting to know more. I won't give away any plot details about the end of the book, but I will say that the book does seem to double down on some of the more ridiculous elements like a string of supremely obvious naming conventions that make the end of the book feel like a very different book from the beginning and lost my attention. I think ultimately this book suffered from an over abundance of narrative ideas and not enough fuel for any one of them to truly take off in my opinion.

All of that said, if you are a fan of a more tongue in cheek sort of SFF or are fans of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams you should give this book a try. I also strongly recommend the audio book as Suzy Jackson does an absolutely amazing job.

A sci-fi thriller, set in a multiverse where each floor of an infinite skyscraper represents a parallel world. When a shapeshifter - Andesir from one of the other universes escapes their floor in an attempt to prevent the destruction of various floors they land on the roof of Carissa’s Elevator and she is soon pulled into the fray.

Carissa is able to travel to various elements of the multiverse in her AI-cloudlet enabled elevator/car, which is like a moving studio apartment - and by using stairwells. There are many sci-fi and magical elements to this world, androids, teleportation, spells and the classic controller of worlds; a board known as - The Association.

The only downs were that it was very wandering storyline with flashbacks and a lot of sub plots. This could’ve been broken up into 2 or 3 manageable and better structured books, to make it more coherent for the reader. There was too much criss crossing information and parallel storylines to fully keep track of.

This has so much potential and was genuinely a great idea for a plot, I love the characters and the adventure of it, the execution just made it rather confusing at times.

The subject and writing style has flavours of Ready Player One and Westworld, maybe with a little Adrian Tchaikovsky - I would recommend this as a long read for people who enjoyed those.

The narrator was really great and made it easy to tell each person apart with their character readings.

3.5 rounded up

I found this hard to follow. Love the idea, great narrator but I was confused about what was happening.

Ninety-five percent of the time I do not enjoy absurdism, and unfortunately this was the case here. There's some fantastic ideas and world building, but the humour and style doesn't sit right with me.

The first 10% of this book sucked me in, I loved it and I thought I was going to love this entire story.

I very much enjoy the premise, a giant skyscraper where each floor could contain an infinite number of worlds. Genius. Carissa lives a comfortable life in an elevator with an AI as her only companion when her peaceful life is suddenly interrupted by a strange being who lands on the roof of her elevator and sets her off on a big adventure. And then this book seemed to lose focus and lost me in the process.

This book suffers from wanting to be everything all at once. The author is clearly very creative and has a huge imagination, but there are too many ideas to keep up with in this novel. It's a bit at odds with itself, feeling light hearted and silly while also being a story about an incredibly high stakes adventure. I do think that this novel would translate to film much better than it does as a book.

Fun book, even with a generic title. I really enjoyed this book, the only reason I didn't give it 5-stars is it falls into the category of sci-fi that I think of Armada and Ready Player One, I call it bubble gum. And they will never get 5 stars. More below.

First off, I was given a digital download of the audiobook from the publisher for free in return for a review. The views in this review are my own and no one from the publisher has even talked with me.

Ok now that that is out of the way.

In my opinion, classic science fiction explores a limited topic, then usually abandons the story when the concept has been explored, and the best could be read in an afternoon. No happy ending, and no real closure because it is more about the concept, the characters are just the medium to explore the condition.

Wild Massive is not that. It is a large sprawling story with many characters that all have pretty well-thought-out back stories that continue to unpack as the story progresses. The world is lived in and interesting. The plot is engaging, and I think it is worth your time if you like enjoyable sci-fi that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Wild Massive introduced a neat concept of a multidimensional building that houses trillions of people, complete dedicated floors to different versions of America, or unknown floors, or contain deadly atmospheres.

The book starts off very well, in my opinion. It is the right amount of wit, sarcasm, and world-building that left me thinking, "I am really enjoying this book." Moore introduces shapeshifters, powerful magicians, un-killable sentient robots, and aliens and demi-gods with almost unlimited power. This book introduces them in fantastic ways and honestly does not take itself too seriously.

When I use the term "bubble gum", I mean lacking substance (think nutritional value). Books like Ready Player One are so "sweet" as to be sickening, with no value overall other than as a slightly better use of your time than watching TV. This book is WAY more substantial than that. Exploring what happens when you are given almost unlimited power or how you shape the decisions of a massive society and crafts it isn't a story that doesn't appear to take itself seriously. Well done.

If it wasn't clear, I did enjoy this book.
What I liked
- the different race/species of characters that each have unique capabilities
- the ideas of Theme Parks becoming historians/internal governments, massive teleporting elevator systems, and the mix of magic and technology

What I didn't like that much
- the book started with very little cursing that I could remember, but towards the end of the book there was a substantial bit more foul language. I know this is minor, but I am not a fan of it, especially in a setting as foreign as this; you could easily step away from it and lose nothing
- the length seems a bit too long. There was a section in the middle where our characters are introduced to a new set of characters that become important, but it does seem to drag out the story a bit.
- The title, seriously, is so bland. It makes sense when you read the book, but I would likely have walked right on by at the bookstore if I hadn't been given a copy just because of the generic name.

I hope you enjoyed this review; I am trying to do a better job of exploring these books; if you want to see or hear more, I was thinking about starting a book review podcast to be more in-depth and compare and contrast new sci-fi to classics and rate them.

I am afraid that the audio format did not work very well for me. The narrator did a good job, but there is just so much in this book. Whenever I got invested and interested it became more complicated, and the time travel definetely did not help. It seems to me that in trying to be meta and make a statement about narratives the author forgot to construct a narrative that is not only compelling but also coherent. Fun, but ultimately overwhelming and unsatisfactory in the end.

Oh wow, this was a ride. The title does not like; this book is wild, and it's massive in scope. Scotto Moore has created a narrative that's encompassing, clever, and yes, a bit bizarre. I absolutely loved the concept from the start; all of reality encases in a massively large building (with, of course, accompanying levels of bureaucracy). It's chock full of references to narrative styles and conventions, so if you're not the type of person who loves to read about the physical embodiment of an abstract concept, this isn't the story for you. However, if you're game to not take things too seriously, you'll really enjoy this surreal take on corporations, multiverses, shape-shifting mages, and sentient elevators.

I think the concept of this book had a lot of potential. However, I felt there were too many plots going on for it to hold my attention.

Wild Massive is the kind of book that I want to see turned into a TV Series or Movies. It has so many different pieces and layers that there is always something captivating going on. Overall I thought it was really well done.

I enjoyed the narration a lot.

Thank you for providing me with an audioARC.

The title and description hooked me!
I was looking forward to diving into this blend of genres but was quickly bogged down in the world-building and meandering plot. There were so many great ideas in this book, but they did not mesh well in my opinion. Also, the sheer length of the book, combined with the seriousness of some of the subjects, did not adhere well to the tone. The dialog was very flippant or goofy, which I usually equate with shorter books geared towards a teenage audience. Not my kind of book.

I usually like sci fi but I found this one lacking. I was attempting to listen to the audiobook and my mind kept wondering. It just didn't hold my attention. I do not post negative reviews. This one will go here but no farther.