“The Only Way Out is Up” by Django Wexler

As I was reading this book, the tagline that kept popping into my head was “BattleBots meets Pokémon,” so I was very entertained when I got to the Acknowledgements section at the end and Wexler said the book arose from a brainstorming session that included the suggestion “...what about robot Pokémon?” What can I say, it works as a method of pitting your minions against others’ minions in brutal combat without crossing over into animal cruelty.

The protagonist is Taj, who scrounges a living in the bottommost level of an underground city with his adoptive brother and sister. It’s known as the Heap, so-called because the entire city is a ring centered on an opening to the mysterious world above, which dumps their garbage down there. It passes through the opening the center of the upper districts (progressively ritzier as you go up) until it hits literal and proverbial rock bottom.

Taj contributes by scavenging, accompanied by his “runic” (a fantasy robot) named Star. Runics are mindless automatons, constructed out of magical runestones inscribed with functions like “move,” “resist,” and “explode,” arranged together into something workable. Except Star is different; his core is a unique runestone inscribed with the word “think,” something neither Taj nor Star (who remembers nothing about himself before Taj found him) has ever heard of elsewhere. For all the reasons you would expect, they keep this a closely guarded secret.

The plot proper takes off when Taj, more down-on-his-luck than usual, meets a woman from the upper tiers of the city who is equally desperate because of high-level political maneuvering. She ends up sponsoring Taj in the Ascent, a competition where runics are pitted against each other with the ultimate winner being allowed to actually leave the underground city and go to the world above.

It’s a “progression fantasy” rather than a true “litRPG,” a distinction that I’ll admit doesn’t mean that much to me. Those expecting Dungeon Crawler Carl (a ubiquitous comparison these days) might be disappointed: there’s no levelling up, no being trapped inside a game. The RPG-ish aspects come from Star being constantly rebuilt and upgraded, and fighting stronger and stronger enemies, as the game goes on. There’s also pretty much none of the slapstick comedy from DCC.

What it does have is some wonderful characters and tremendous readability. Django’s writing is always effortless to read, and this is no exception. I blew through this in a couple of days, and frequently lost all track of time while doing so (more than usual).

My big criticism is the inclusion of a sexual assault scene against the love interest/secondary protagonist. Lots has been written about the problem of writers using a rape (or in this case attempted rape) of a female character as a source for character development; while I don’t think Django necessarily did it poorly, I also don’t think it really added anything that couldn’t have been added in other ways.

But that criticism aside, I’m looking forward to the next one.