Author: Richard Dansky
Publisher: Journalstone
Rating: worthy
Vaporware is a great title for this novel even though it’s actually inaccurate in more ways than one. It’s the kind of title that makes you wish you’d thought it up first, although as one reviewer has already pointed out, Ghost in the Machine is more applicable, if rather more ho-hum. Personally, I would have preferred Blue Lightning! It's right there on the box! Vaporware is a term used to describe software which often arises as a result of a larger corporation wanting to, shall I say, close the window on a smaller outfit. The larger corp announces a product which is essentially the same thing as the cool new app from the start-up or the smaller business, and because everyone now thinks that the mega corp is going to include it free with their operating system, they don’t bother to buy the start-up's version, effectively killing their app. Meanwhile the megacorp never did intend on producing any version of the app, but they still slapped-down and shut-out the competition. Such is business.
This is the first Dansky I've read (and I suspect it’s his first novel), but my initial impressions were good. The novel is well-written - if you ignored some clunkers like the weird sentence at the bottom of p271: "The smell of hot lead drifted then past me as I waited." The story is interesting, so I had no problem continuing to read, and even rather resenting when I had to quit for one reason or another (work is such a killjoy isn’t it?!). Dansky is a game developer, and so the basic situation he's presenting here is that of a small game development company (Horseshoe) beholden to a much larger corporate money bag. The story is told through Ryan, the lead in the development team. It's also told in in first person PoV, which I normally detest, but for some reason it doesn’t seem distractingly obtrusive or weirdly unnatural here. I don’t know why that is. Ryan is one of the senior developers - indeed, this project was his to begin with. He came up with the idea. The funny thing is that I can’t help but see Ryan as a proxy for Dansky! But hey, write what you know, right? Maybe!
Horseshoe has a brand-new game called Blue Lightning which is almost ready for an alpha test release, which means, all being well, that it's not that far from being on sale. It’s your standard first person shooter, but it has a new game engine and some nifty tricks and treats to set it significantly above competitors. While the game is up and running (and playable) it also still needs a lot of final nudges and tweaks before it’s ready for release to the public. The big conflict point in this novel is that on the very day they send a presentation to the money bags for approval to proceed (and some fat corporate bucks to keep them in business) the corporate guy kills the project, and tells them he wants them to begin developing something else - some project named 'Salvador' which is conveniently owned in toto by the bigger corporation, which depresses and pisses-off everyone at Horseshoe. This project is a port (the game has already been developed, but they need a team to prepare it for a different games platform), so this feels like a big slap in the face to the team at Horseshoe.
That's business - or what passes for it in this day and age. The difference here is that the main character in the game seems to have something to say about it! Some really oddball things start happening to Ryan. The first of these was that there was what the developers thought was a brown-out (just a brief glitch in power), but when Ryan's computer came back up, it came up to a presentation of the project - which he didn’t even have on his desktop computer. This seems to be tied to the second odd thing, which is that the corporate presentation has been changed - made 'sexier' than the original one they had. No one owns-up to changing it; then it becomes moot as the project goes down the drain (as opposed to down the tubes where they wanted it to go!). But there's another mini-brown-out, and the next morning as Ryan drives to work and tries to play some music on his iPhone, he keeps getting music from the game, which he didn’t think he had on his phone! Curiouser and curiouser....
It’s worth noting that Ryan has some history - a troubled affair with a co-worker named Michelle (who is another member of Horseshoe's senior management), which still haunts him, her, and his boss Eric. His friend Leon, another senior employee at Horseshoe is aware of his affair (everyone is!) and also has designs on Michelle. His live-in companion, Sarah is another one who knows. She's nudging him gently for more commitment and she has...leverage. She's just been given a big promotion, and with her new job came more bucks, she offers Ryan a chance to quit his long-hours, and the stressful and demanding job, so he can spend his time working on his novel instead. He already has fifty thousand words down. Why he needs significantly more time on it is a bit of a mystery, but again this makes this novel seem much more autobiographical, doesn't it? Ryan is a game developer writing a novel, Dansky is a game developer who has published a novel.
Ryan is a moron if he doesn’t take up Sarah's offer both for more commitment and for writing. Hell if he doesn’t want to take her up on it, I will! lol! I’d love an opportunity like that. Why Ryan was even questioning this chance is a question in itself (and causes me to question his questionable judgment!), but my worst feeling at that point was that he wouldn’t be smart enough to commit and he would end up losing Sarah. He's an idiot. Girls like Sarah are rare and to be treasured, but it’s his life to ruin, right?! Maybe it won’t pan out like that.
On the down side - the very minor downside - I found it odd that in a cutting-edge game development company, they’re using a whiteboard instead of teleconferencing and an eboard. It's even odder that his partner Sarah calls him on his desk phone rather than his cell. Doesn’t he have a cell? This is brushed under the carpet with a mention of limited minutes on the phone. Honestly? Dansky also seems a bit amateurish in, at one point, specifying that Ryan's desktop computer has a 36" flat screen monitor. This is 2013 (in the novel world). Was anyone outside of third world countries still using cathode ray tubes as monitors?! This is also a cutting-edge game development business. Why wouldn’t they have 36" flat screens? But that’s not a killer, so other than it arresting my attention for a second it didn’t detract from the story.
What I did find rather more odd was that there is some seriously weird formatting in this printed novel starting on pages 51 - 53. There wasn't any before that. It appeared in the form of excessive blank vertical spacing between one character's comment and another character's reaction to it. It’s the kind of space you leave in a novel when you're switching scenes and don’t want to start a new chapter for it, or when you want to indicate that some amount of time has passed between one event and another, except that in this case, no scene was switched and no time had passed, so I can only ascribe it to bad editing or bad formatting. What it actually looks like is that the text was hard-formatted for one book format and then got printed in another without being corrected, so the pagination is off. It’s noticeable and a bit distracting, but it's not a killer.
When Ryan learns that one of the engineers is still working on the Blue Lightning project (I guess it never crosses their mind to archive the files and password-protect them so only senior staff can get in there!) and slacking off his day job, Leon, his lead engineering friend, sets up web cams in the place where Terry, the offending engineer works, and the two of them, along with Michelle, spy on him via the cams. They see Blue Lightning actually come out of the computer just like the novel's cover illustration shows. The funniest thing about this part is the web cams. They get destroyed, and Leon whines about the cost, but these are nothing more than cheap-ass low-res webcams which cost next to nothing. But now the Djin is out of the bottle and there's no tonic for it!
I don’t know if Dansky fully intended Ryan to be the complete jerk and loser that he is, or if he doesn't know how to write a character who merits sympathy, but I don’t like the guy at all (Ryan, not Dansky!). He's certainly the team leader in bad decision-making, and the star supervisor of stupid. He has a bit of a blow-up with Sarah, who is the most awesome character in this entire novel. She is only trying to prevent this jerk from self-destructing, but rather than wise-up, Ryan ends-up betraying Sarah and sleeping with Michelle one drunken evening - quite literally sleeping as well as the other thing. Sarah is ignorant of his behavior, and she's heart-rendingly conciliatory when they get together later the next afternoon. She thinks he fell asleep at the office again, and slept there overnight instead of in Michelle's bed. Why either Sarah or Michelle would want anything to do with this self-centered loser is a mystery because he doesn’t seem to have a damned thing to recommend him, and he's screwing both of them in every possible way. I guess some women have too much decency (or shamelessness in Michelle's case) and nowhere near enough skepticism, because the sad thing is that this kind of thing actually happens in real life, too!
The problem with all this is that this soap opera, along with the day-to-day details of the computer game-designing business, are really overshadowing the ghost in the machine story. Why? Did Dansky intend to write a soap opera with some sci-fi thrown in or did he just lose his focus? Does he not know why people might take a look at this novel? I have to ask because it doesn't read to me like the kind of novel which game players would be interested in - they're too busy playing games! And it's a bit too procedural and technical for the casual reader, although sci-fi enthusiasts might pick it up, but then they, too, are likely to be disappointed by the soap-opera aspects of it! It seems like a comic-book format might have suited this story better.
I don’t know. I've liked the story, and I've followed it without bitching too much as I read, but the novel loses a lot of credibility with me at this point because this phenomenon that they've witnessed is completely outside the box (literally!), and yet none of the three people who have now newly learned of it seem to be at all amazed, intrigued, freaked-out, or curious about it! They simply continue on with their petty social interactions as though nothing bizarre has happened. Not a single one of them immediately confronts the engineer who seems to be most directly involved with bringing Blue Lightning literally to life. Can you say, "Not credible"? Given how dumb Ryan and Michelle are, this actually isn’t surprising, but I would have expected an entirely different pattern of behavior from Leon. Eventually, four of the slackers involved in resurrecting Blue Lightning do get fired, but not the ring-leader, because they need him for the project! What?!
In conclusion, Vaporware was entertaining to me, but the ending was a disappointment. I guess it was in keeping with way this story was told, but it was a bit bizarre to say the least; however, since Ryan got exactly what he deserved, I guess I won't complain too much about that, and I'll rate this as a worthy read!
