Oct 7, 2026 · 45 min · 9 segments
Brian and Barbara review the novel Platform Decay by Martha Wells, the eighth book in her award-winning "Murderbot Diaries" science fiction series, and number eight on the New York Times hardcover…
Before we review Platform Decay, anything else newsworthy on the list this first week of October 2026? Well,
I thought it might be time to finally acknowledge the elephant in the room.
Ooh, which is? Last episode, we reviewed the book that is clearly selling the best for the year so far.
Yes, but notably, she is not the author who's been dominating the list this year.
Hmm, that would be...
Matt Dinaman.
And he is.
He's the author of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which essentially took over the hard fiction list this year.
Background, please.
Okay, but first a little bit about the genre he's writing within.
Lit RPG.
Not lit as in light them up, but lit as in literary.
Think Dungeons and Dragons all the way up to, I don't know, Disco Elysium, plus everything in between, and synths.
How do you make that literary?
Well, you write a story about a professional gamer.
Or a story about a person trapped inside a virtual world set up as a game.
Or you make the whole world into a game.
For
instance, by having your main character step into a portal that whisks him or her off to another dimension.
For instance, by having aliens take over and, for their own nefarious purposes, force us to navigate the levels of some complicated and dangerous new reality that they have crafted.
So how does Deniman fit in?
Before we review Platform Decay, anything else newsworthy on the list this first week of October 2026? Well,
I thought it might be time to finally acknowledge the elephant in the room.
Ooh, which is? Last episode, we reviewed the book that is clearly selling the best for the year so far.
Yes, but notably, she is not the author who's been dominating the list this year.
Hmm, that would be...
Matt Dinaman.
And he is.
He's the author of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which essentially took over the hard fiction list this year.
Background, please.
Okay, but first a little bit about the genre he's writing within.
Lit RPG.
Not lit as in light them up, but lit as in literary.
Think Dungeons and Dragons all the way up to, I don't know, Disco Elysium, plus everything in between, and synths.
How do you make that literary?
Well, you write a story about a professional gamer.
Or a story about a person trapped inside a virtual world set up as a game.
Or you make the whole world into a game.
For
instance, by having your main character step into a portal that whisks him or her off to another dimension.
For instance, by having aliens take over and, for their own nefarious purposes, force us to navigate the levels of some complicated and dangerous new reality that they have crafted.
So how does Deniman fit in?
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