THE GOD GAME / AUTHOR: DANNY TOBEY / PUBLISHER: GOLLANCZ / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
The God Game is a sci-fi techno thriller set in the modern day. It’s the tale of five misfit friends who, though over-achievers with solid futures planned, get sucked into a strange online conspiracy. They discover a game which assigns tasks to each player and the more they do for the game, the more advantages in the real world the players get.
Deliver a box, get your high school grades modified, that sort of thing. The game is called G.O.D. and this apparently rogue AI believes its own hype. After all, thanks to things like mobile phones, Alexa and the internet, it can pretty much be all-seeing and all-knowing. Things take a sinister turn pretty quickly, or we wouldn’t have a story.
Despite the modern trappings, the vibe is very 80s. The kids have their own cool team name (The Vindicators), speak in pop culture references, care about their grades and so on. We have the scholarly one, the rich kid, the girl, the charming everyday character and the one with serious self-image issues. All pretty much cookie cutter characters from any given John Hughes movie. Each character has their own problems, guilty secrets and growing pains.
We often talk about how books tend to go for a cinematic vibe, and that normally means that they have tightly written prose that allows the reader to picture epic chase scenes and provide the sort of special effects only found in the imagination. The God Game doesn’t do this; instead it wants to crank out the retro music and have the reader reminisce about how tough high school was. It’s like a Hollywood movie in the sense that it doesn’t feel terribly original. It relies too heavily on the reader to fill in the gaps. This means that rather than second guessing the plot you can pretty much see through the storyline and figure out what’s coming next.
This would be fine if the characters were interesting. Unfortunately, it fails to make any of the characters distinctive. Even the two main friends in the story, Peter and Charlie (the rich kid and the everyday hero) are very similar to each other. Though we get a slow reveal that makes them distinctive over time, at the start all these kids seem equally likeable, dumb and optimistic. The pacing is uneven and the story begins to groan under its own weight at times. The combination of samey characters and plodding plot means that it’s easy to miss some of the good stuff.
There are some great highlights; the premise of G.O.D. is fascinating and the various payoffs are clever. Alas it can’t decide if it’s a thriller, a fantasy or something else, and the story suffers for that. All that aside, Danny Tobey is a dynamic and clever writer. We are keen to see what he does next.
