Review: The Doomsday Machine by Erick Drake

Take a raucous ride through endless space, dark humor, and epic strangeness with The Doomsday Machine (Space Scrap 17 Book 1), a wild debut novel from Erick Drake. Magicians, alien war machines, spiteful coalescing gods, and one fearless scrap scavenger collide for a uniquely tongue-in-cheek space adventure.

Admiral Daryl is a scatterbrained, entertaining, and tone-setting figure, as well as the father of Daisy Daryl, the protagonist, a brand new captain in Daryl’s less-than-impressive space garbage-hauling fleet. The main conflict of the novel is not with her potentially chaotic first mission through a wormhole, but rather the contentious relationship with her new second in command, Michigan Jones, a zebra-abusing ex-boyfriend with a dangerous penchant for nihilism. Sexual tension and outright disdain blend beautifully in an argument-ridden tumble through the cosmos.

It’s easy to get distracted from the tangled plotline if you aren’t paying attention, due to the tangential narrative thoughts and amusing musings: “Jones was convinced that he had in fact been twins, himself lazy and unfocused, the other full of buzz and intelligence. He was also convinced that he had absorbed his twin in the womb because the bright, optimistic, action-oriented other had disturbed his sleep.” Clever, long-delivery lines like this are reminiscent of Tom Robbins. Like Robbins, Drake is not only a magnificent storyteller, but also masterful with his language, humor, and snark. The ridiculous and pseudo-surreal nature of certain story details also summons visions of Douglas Adams and his Infinite Improbability Drive.

The story is a perpetual dive into disbelief, as new technologies, species, histories, and laws of physics are introduced at every turn. The writing is immersive and dense, with multilayered jokes and callback humor, as well as witty wordplay on nearly every page. Some of the slapstick language is corny enough to elicit a groan, particularly the elbow-nudging wordplay on idioms, but the story is charmingly weird. The stakes of this novel’s epic plot are cosmically high, but nothing about the book takes itself seriously.

Despite the novel being set in a far-flung future of hyper-intelligent robots, space travel, and cosmic machines of which humanity can only dream, much of the social commentary feels ripped right from our modern world. From political campaign exhaustion and fluid gender dynamics to floundering for a sense of identity in a rapidly changing universe, there are plenty of touchpoints to reality that hold readers in place, even as this undeniably ridiculous plot unfolds.

From a technical standpoint, there is some sloppiness in the writing, including choppy, incomplete, and abrupt sentences, as well as an excess of adjectives in many passages. Granted, this casual writing style fits in with the whipsmart, wise-cracking tone of this whole book, as well as the low-brow humor that peppers the prose, but an editing sweep could adjust some of these clunkier lines.

As a whole, however, this kaleidoscopic comedy is a hilarious delight, brimming with sass, creativity, and jaw-dropping bursts of action.