The Broken World
Tim Etchells
420 pages
published in 2008
Long live the public library. If it wasn’t for the fact that Night of Knives caught my eye having, I never would’ve seen The Broken World lurking nearby on the shelve, with a cover that looked like it could be something sufficiently science fictional as well. It turned out not to be, but I’m not complaining. Instead this is a novel that would appeal to any geek at least on a surface level, as it’s the story of a twentysomething slacker putting his considerable intelligence in playing through The Broken World, his favourite game while writing a walkthrough for it. In the process
the game and his real life start melding together, his friends popping up in the game while developments there mirror what’s happening to him outside of it and vice versa.
I started out hoping this would be a mindfuck novel, ala the Illuminantus trilogy or certain Philip K. Dick novels where the boundaries between fiction and reality are deliberately underminded until the novel seeps through in your own life, but alas. Instead, this is Microserfs for a generation to which playing computer games is as interesting and important as computer programming, an examination of modern life through a shared metaphor rather than an undermining of it.