Gamification - BookWyrm

159 pages

English language

Published Dec. 15, 2013

ISBN:: 978-1-77148-151-9
OCLC Number:: 855461592

(1 review)

This is a double novella "flip book" pairing a modern corporate suspense story about the cover-up of a CEO's illicit affair, with a 1970s-era science fiction thriller about an oil company's environmental disaster. It is an exploration of the paranoia inherent in business and the thin line between competition and conspiracy.

GAMIFICATION What would you do if you learned your corporation had killed to cover up a secret? Reid Frank was head of human development at the giant energy company, Xcelsion, until his Internet gambling addiction pulled him into an embezzlement scheme that cost him his career, his marriage, and his name. An ex-felon, abandoned and broke, Frank Reade is now answering phones at a call center, when a call from an old friend at Xcelsion pulls him back into the game. Xcelsion is under siege. Merger rumors and an environmental scandal are crippling the company, but an affair between …

This is a double novella "flip book" pairing a modern corporate suspense story about the cover-up of a CEO's illicit affair, with a 1970s-era science fiction thriller about an oil company's environmental disaster. It is an exploration of the paranoia inherent in business and the thin line between competition and conspiracy.

GAMIFICATION What would you do if you learned your corporation had killed to cover up a secret? Reid Frank was head of human development at the giant energy company, Xcelsion, until his Internet gambling addiction pulled him into an embezzlement scheme that cost him his career, his marriage, and his name. An ex-felon, abandoned and broke, Frank Reade is now answering phones at a call center, when a call from an old friend at Xcelsion pulls him back into the game. Xcelsion is under siege. Merger rumors and an environmental scandal are crippling the company, but an affair between the CEO and an executive at a rival firm might destroy it. Reade is told to make the affair disappear. He needs the money. He loves the game. Then he makes the mistake of his life and falls for the woman himself. On the run, Reade becomes lost in a double world ruled by shadow deals and murder until he discovers a pulp science fiction novel, Attack of the Sea Monkeys, about an oil company in the 1970s, that leads him to a shocking truth about Xcelsion.

C-MONKEYS In 1973, Mideast strife and the oil crisis have knocked the global economy to its knees. With every company and country locked in a search for new sources of energy, the reclusive industrialist, Dr. Petr Chopek, calls the world's greatest scientists, engineers, and business leaders to his remote South Pacific island to show them what he has discovered. Pulp fiction writer, Gadsen Wells, is not a scientist but when his new companion, renowned paleo-botanist, Dr. Harold Braunhut, dies mysteriously, Wells takes his place on the decrepit prop plane flying to Chopek's island. Accompanied by Braunhut's beautiful nurse, Amber, Wells finds a paradise where scientists are engaged in experiments to learn how to exploit a new energy source linked to a species of giant salamander, long thought to be extinct. Then Wells learns Chopek's true plans. The ancient salamanders are being genetically altered, designed not to save the world but to control it. Wells and Amber escape Chopek's spies and sneak into the labyrinth beneath the island to try to stop him. As though Jules Verne had written a James Bond novel, C-Monkeys is a ripping read about a world just strange enough to be real.

1 edition

unsquare reviewed Gamification by Keith Hollihan

Review of 'Gamification' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Gamification and C-Monkeys are a pair of related novellas sold together as a “flip book” with a different cover on each side. The effect is clearly meant as a call-back to days when publishers sold slim, pulpy novels in bound pairs, and although both stories include familiar beats, Hollihan leavens each with modern ecological concerns and stylistic touches.

I decided to start reading these novellas thanks to a highly scientific method that involved skimming the first page of every review copy I have in my possession until I found one that hooked me enough to keep reading.

Gamification, a thriller about corporate espionage, offered just the right combination of spare prose and business jargon. I was soon caught up in the plight of the main character, a former corporate executive and current ex-con recently released from prison and struggling to make ends meet. When he begins working under-the-table for his …

Gamification and C-Monkeys are a pair of related novellas sold together as a “flip book” with a different cover on each side. The effect is clearly meant as a call-back to days when publishers sold slim, pulpy novels in bound pairs, and although both stories include familiar beats, Hollihan leavens each with modern ecological concerns and stylistic touches.

I decided to start reading these novellas thanks to a highly scientific method that involved skimming the first page of every review copy I have in my possession until I found one that hooked me enough to keep reading.

Gamification, a thriller about corporate espionage, offered just the right combination of spare prose and business jargon. I was soon caught up in the plight of the main character, a former corporate executive and current ex-con recently released from prison and struggling to make ends meet. When he begins working under-the-table for his old company cleaning up after the CEO’s ill-advised affair with a woman at a rival company, things start to get hairy.

Hollihan definitely knows his jargon. I’m pretty sure that if you turn this book sideways, a few inter-office memos and a quarterly report might fall out. He also has a pretty solid grasp of thriller conventions and pacing; the book starts out slow but steady until things inevitably begin escalating and Hollihan pulls the rug out from under his main character.

It was exciting reading, and I definitely enjoyed the experience, but the end of the novella left several story threads unresolved or unexplained, and I was admittedly a bit confused about who did what to whom and why. It felt a bit like Hollihan ignored motivations and explanations in the name of surprise and excitement. It worked in the moment, but ultimately left me unsatisfied.

I assumed that C-Monkeys might shed some light on the parts of Gamification that remained unexplained, but I was sadly disappointed. At one point in Gamification, the main character is given a pulpy dime-store novel about a mad scientist on a mysterious island full of giant salamanders. C-Monkeys is essentially the expanded version of that novel’s summary.

Unfortunately, in expanding the story, Hollihan doesn’t bring much more to the table. The main character in C-Monkeys is a cipher with no backstory and no clear motivations. We are eventually told a bit more about who he is and why he might want to sneak on the island, but it comes late in the story and feels like an arbitrary info-dump instead of a shocking revelation. Honestly, nothing about C-Monkeys felt particularly surprising or remarkable.

I wanted to like Gamification and C-Monkeys more than I did. Both novellas were eminently readable, and Hollihan gets a surprising amount of entertainment mileage out of corporate espionage and the particulars of drilling for oil, but Gamification’s many twists add up to a whole lot of nonsense and C-Monkeys just feels unnecessary. I might be up for reading more of Hollihan’s work, but I can’t recommend this pair of novellas.

Subjects

Canadian Fantasy fiction
Salamanders
Fiction