Saturday 21 November 2009

More Machine than Man...

When trawling the internets for movie related news and stuffs I came upon an article on Dark Horizons about a movie of Machine Man being developed. So obviously I assumed it was yet another potentially cool Marvel adaptation (although based on the relatively obscure nature of the source material, I would probably have safer to assume it would be bad beyond all hope) . However, I was wrong. It was nothing to do with that.

Instead it was based upon a work in progress novel by a guy called Max Barry (who I had never heard of), about an engineer who decides that his body is inadequate, and begins to upgrade himself. (read the article I originally read here). I visited hi hope page and read the first few pages of the "book" online. Before I knew it I had read 30 odd pages and was well and truly hooked. Annoyingly, in a perfectly sensible and intelligent way, only the first 30 odd pages are free then you have to subscribe to the RSS feed for a nominal fee. Being weak willed, I paid the fee and now get a page of the novel emailed to me every week day as well as being able to read it on google feed reader.

Its a great mix of humour, fun and sci-fi elements with a dark core. The main character is equally brilliant, socially inept, deeply disturbed and scarily innocent. His motivations are logical and in his own head (and the story is through his eyes) all his actions are perfectly normal. I would highly recommend giving the first few pages a crack if nothing else.

Anyway, just though I would share this with you as it would be good to compare notes on it with someone else. I am loving it, and really liking the idea behind releasing it a page at a time, although it does have me hitting send and receive on Outlook with increase frequency while waiting for a new page to arrive...

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