Martin Millar

I picked 'Supercute Futures' off my local library's sci-fi shelf as it looked potentially intriguing. The narrative centres on Mox and Mitsu, lifelong friends and business partners who own and run a vast multinational conglomerate called Supercute Enterprises. They began as social media influencers and fifty-ish years later in a grim future of environmental disaster sell entertainment, weapons, and desalinisation plants with kawaii branding. Although they are from London, there is too little of Japan left for cultural appropriation to be of any concern. The action-packed plot follows an attempt to oust Mitsu and Mox from their company. These hypercapitalist versus hypercapitalist stakes were not enough to create much suspense for me. I felt no sense of peril and all of the frequent violence seemed distant.

Indeed, the book's whole tone was rather offhand. While it contained some interesting ideas and many neat concepts, none of them were developed in any great depth. Mox and Mitsu could have been such fascinating characters and I wanted further insight into them. The reader listens into brief snippets of their discussions with an AI therapist, yet they remain largely mysterious. Other characters verge upon caricatures, notably the alcoholic private eye with a military past. The most vivid and detailed aspects of the book are Supercute's products and branding, which I should perhaps have expected from the title. There are some reflections upon the amoral destructiveness of gigantic businesses, yet they are also too abbreviated and superficial to become genuinely satirical. I enjoyed most of the one-liners and all of the outfit details, while hoping for more developed protagonists, considered critique of capitalism, or ideally both. 'Supercute Futures' prioritised zany action sequences instead.… (more)

This book is SO PROFOUNDLY MISOGYNIST. I read all of its 500-page bulk, desperately hoping that this premise, which I /love/ would bear fruit, but instead I got an exhausting view into a gross man's imagined version of women's interiors: every female character is intensely obsessed with and terrified of the concept that she may not be the most beautiful woman in the room at any given moment. Fuck this bullshit that imagines eating disorders as a kind of paranoid vanity and imagines all women as constantly in weird awful competition with each other for the attention of any passing male. Fuck Martin Millar, frankly.… (more)

What a remarkably strange book! Meet Ruby through the eyes of an unnamed protagonist, if he can stop hallucinating about alien abductions, goddesses in his bed, and robot astronauts for long enough, that is. Ruby who always walks barefoot and wears nothing but a violet dress and sunglasses. Ruby who is sensible in all things (except maybe boyfriend choice). Ruby the dreamer. Underneath a strange gritty exterior, this book is about the best kind of friendship, the kind where you can help your friend fit her diaphragm right while discussing poetry and werewolves.… (more)

Elfish and Mo were in a band together but after their relationship crashed and burned then so did the band. Mo is putting a new band together and to spite Elfish is going to use the name Queen Mab for it as he knows she wants that too. Elfish in desperation agrees to a contest with the winner earning the right to the name. She has to learn a 43 line speech from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and recite it prior to the live debut of Mo’s new band. She has a week. Good job she has no scruples and will stop at nothing to get what she wants.

This is my least favourite of the author’s works I’ve read so far. The main character is a hedonistic narcissist who lies and cheats her way though life with the rest of the characters just being there for her to abuse. Despite this, the “story” is not as appalling as it sounds. It’s a slice-of-life tale about a struggling wannabe musician in ‘90’s Brixton. It’s fast-paced and told in short chapters as Elfish careens from one disaster to the next. I did kind of end up rooting for her in the end.… (more)