worm

wildbow

So it's time for something completely different. This is a little out of my normal fare, but I've seen it recommended for years and never managed to get around to reading it, but I recently picked up a Kindle which made the prospect a whole lot more feasible. 

So worm is a web serial, and it's about 5k pages long. Yeah. Slightly over 5k, in fact. If that seems daunting, well it kind of is. Thankfully, the prose is incredibly readable, and quite fast paced (although there's a slow 500 pages or so around the 80% mark. I'm willing to forgive that, considering it's less than 10% of the book). 

But what is worm about? It's a serial about superheroes and supervillains, but mostly about supervillains. Set in an alternate Earth where people started getting superpowers around the 70's when a mysterious golden man appeared out of nowhere. worm follows Taylor, a teenage girl with the power to control bugs. And if that sounds like a lame superpower to you, well prepare to be constantly surprised over the the next five thousand pages. In general, it's just really fun to read through and enjoy the fucking rad superpowers and how they work in really neat ways.

I've never read a serial novel before, but I have read manga, and that's what worm reminds me of. Similar action focused+long overarching plotline+deep world+tons of character development, except, you know, it has probably between five and ten times the length and detail of even the longest running of manga. If you've ever read a really neat manga or webcomic and wished there was more to the world, that you'd get to discover all those secrets it's been hinting at, well have I got a book for you.

Important note: The first part (maybe 100 pages? honestly not sure) of worm heavily focuses on high school bullying. And it's disturbingly accurate. That slows down and disappears as the story progresses, but if that sort of thing makes you so upset you can't power through it, this isn't the book for you.

That said, the writing improves almost constantly as the story progresses (aside from the slow bit I mentioned before). Things keep getting more and more interesting and exciting, without feeling too overwhelming, except in the places it's meant to be overwhelming.

I could talk about worm for pages, but the summary of it is this. I really really really enjoyed it. It was deep, well-written, and scratched an itch I've had for years. If this sounds remotely interesting to you, I urge you to try it out. It may not be for everyone, but if it is for you I'd hate for you to miss out on it. Also, it's free (although you can support wildbow on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow)

(also the author is a machine. He wrote those 5k pages over 2 years, and then wrote another serial that's 3k pages long about demon magic over the next year, and is currently working on his third which I haven't looked at but is already huge. He updates chapters I believe two or three times a week. So if you need something to check in on and read every week, this will not disappoint)

That's all for now folks. Stay tuned for tomorrow, when I will have an exciting (although not precisely fantasy related) announcement!

-Leo

You can find worm at https://parahumans.wordpress.com/. If you want to read it on an ebook reader rather than online (which I wholeheartedly recommend), go to https://github.com/rhelsing/worm_scraper, which is a tool that scrapes the website and compiles an ebook out of it. There's some formatting errors, but by and large it works great.