Max Barry's Machine Man

I am a huge Max Barry fan. Completely unapologetic, too. The man’s got a wit so sharp it could slice diamonds, a knack for creating unique characters without crossing over to the side of ridiculous caricatures and nobody, seriously nobody, does love triangles and nerd romances quite like him.

I think it’s official now, after fifty-some installments, that we can now add “drives the experimental novel like he stole it” to a list of Barry’s accomplishments.

Barry’s no stranger to more typical means of literary promotion. He has a blog. He has a Twitter. Hell, he even links to NationStates, the international simulation game based off his novel Jennifer Government, on his website. Standard stuff, really, especially for an author in the twenty-first century with global appeal and readership.

What he’s gone and done now, though, is a bit different. Machine Man is a take on the Japanese cell phone novel, a work of (usually) short fiction published online in small bursts, generally written on and designed for the displays of handheld devices. They are immensely popular in the Land of the Rising Sun, and some have made the lucrative transition from digital copy to print edition.

Max Barry has done something similar, though not through cellular technology. He’s writing a page a day and publishing each one on his website. He writes the pages one at a time and they appear on the site and in subscribers’ email boxes in the early morning (at least where I am, in US Eastern). While the feed was still in its free beta stage you could also get your pages via Twitter, but after #43 (which is an amazing section of the novel, by the way) you have to be a paid subscriber in order to view the daily updates.

Machine Man is about one Dr. Charlie Neumann, research scientist for a shadowy company called Better Future. Charlie has an accident. Charlie loses a limb. Charlie becomes a prosthesis addict. That’s all I’m going to say, but rest assured the plot is standard Barry goodness. Don’t believe me? Scribe, Barry’s domestic publisher, bought print rights while the project was still in infancy.

Six ninety-five may seem like a steep price to pay for electronic media, especially of the non-music variety, but there’s no email I receive that’s as welcome as my morning Machine Man fix.