It’s officially a good time to be a dungeon crawler, says Alasdair Stuart.

As well as being a Clarke award finalist this year (the rules are on year of publication and the book was republished in the Clarke window) Matt Diniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl has been around in some form since 2020 and has only ever built momentum over the course of the four years since launch. Here’s the premise:

‘The apocalypse will be televised!

You know what’s worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what’s worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction of all man-made structures on Earth, and the systematic exploitation of all the survivors for a sadistic intergalactic game show. That’s what.’

Carl, the lead, is a coast guard vet turned ‘crawler’ with valentines heart boxer shorts, no shoes and his ex-girlfriend’s award winning show cat Princess Donut the Queen Anee Chonk. Together (mostly) they pick their way across the ruined world, dealing with the fact Donut can talk and fighting aliens, monsters, an insane AI and other survivors, all while being filmed.

It’s a wild premise, marrying the litrpg genre with some pretty tone deaf, snarky, downward punching choices before taking some hard left turns into colossal scope and surprising emotional depth. Which could also be a sentence describing the first season of The Orville, Seth MacFarlane’s Star Trek-esque show which is apparently circling a fourth season. The first six episodes of the show are very, very bad to the point of unwatchable before it finds its groove and turns in some really impressive, kind SF.

I mention this firstly because the second and third seasons of The Orville are great and MacFarlane has just received a straight to series order for an adaptation of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Chris Yost (Maul: Shadow Lord and Thor: Ragnarok) will write and executive produce the show and I’m guessing that MacFarlane is in the mix somewhere as the voice of Princess Chonk.

Keep an eye on this one. It’s a great fit for MacFarlane and his team and if anyone can bring the genuine good in the series out early, it’s them.

 

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