Carl’s Doomsday Scenario
Matt Dinniman
Show biz and politics
In my review of Dungeon Crawler Carl, the first novel in Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl series, I mentioned that Dungeon Crawler Carl has a plot armor problem. That is, because we know that this is the first book of an eight-book series starring Carl and Princess Donut, the battles that form the bulk of the story are low-stakes, no matter how violent the action or apparently fearsome the monsters being fought. We know that Dungeon Crawler Carl is the first book of an eight-novel series, and that therefore no battle can end Carl and Princess Donut.
Novel 2, Carl's Doomsday Scenario, is better than Dungeon Crawler Carl, because Dinniman has worked out a way around that problem. We learned in DCC that it's all show business. The dungeon is under constant surveillance, and the footage is used to assemble a reality TV program. (It's not literally television, of course, but that's close enough.) This is the most popular show in the Universe, and it's HUGELY popular. And profitable. And political. The show itself is only the start. There are chat shows in which popular crawlers (including our heroes Carl and Princess Donut) are interviewed, and those are also big money-makers.
Now, although I described the stakes for Carl and Princess Donut as low, they are anything but that for most of the crawlers. The takeover of the Earth with which the dungeon started instantly killed everyone was was under a roof at the time, a majority of Earth's population. And most of those who die in fights in the dungeon really die. The survivors are now down to less than 700,000. Thus 99.99% of Earth's pre-dungeon population is dead, and the remaining survivors are dying fast.
Carl and Donut know, even while fighting dungeon monsters and, when unavoidable, other crawlers, that those they are trying to kill are not the real enemies. The real enemies are Borant, the corporate nation-state running the franchise this season, and the other corporate entities who profit when it is their turn to run the dungeon. Although this was all implied in DCC, in CDS show biz and politics come to the fore.
At the same time, Carl and Princess Donut still spend most of their time fighting life-or-death battles. While they're doing that, they have the job of understanding the technical and political environment in which the battles take place. They need to come up with strategies and tactics that, short-term, allow them to survive the battle, and long-term, offer a way out. We're only at novel 2, so those long-term strategies are only dimly perceived.
It makes a more compelling story than the "kill, kill, kill" action of DCC. I enjoyed CDS and will continue with the series.