Hench is a lot more serious and deep than you'd expect from some of the flippant descriptions. I went in wanting something as light escapism. That's not what I got, but it was certainly worth a read, and I liked it far more than a few other things I've picked up recently that looked better on the surface.
Content warning proper spoilers - also this is less edited than normal sorry
You know, my day’s been rough, and I don’t want to take the effort to soften this, so take it with a pinch of salt. I like efficiency fantasies a lot, so I had hopes for this. Alas!
Maybe people in offices really do talk like this? I feel like they don’t though. Maybe it’s just that this is absolutely how I talked on the internet as a teenager, but the cod-formal/professional-but-trying-to-sound-sinister register that the protagonist and Leviathan take in dialogue lifts me right out of the story, it’s very unconvincing. Every time Leviathan and Anna have a conversation it feels like watching two badly made chatbots interact. I get that it’s an evil corporate efficiency power fantasy, it’s just, eh. If we saw her deciding to develop it/reflecting on it, or other people reacting to it ever in ways other than ‘unearned fear/respect’, it would feel more intentionally silly and I’d find it less jarring. Some of the lines that are supposed to be cool section-enders straight up do not land, like - “Anna, just because you’ve built unknowingly on top of a graveyard doesn’t mean those bodies aren’t in the ground.”? This is if anything More clunky in context. And everybody working for Leviathan ends up speaking a bit like this! Even in casual conversation - Vesper says “It seems like folly to abandon it now”, in a conversation that otherwise is on of my favourites in the book & has a refreshingly appropriate register for its intensity. At least when Supercollider speaks grandiosely it’s intentionally overblown, like, explaining the concept of chess in a self-absorbed speech. When they do it… I can’t tell! I think the author thinks it’s cool!
I like how the good working environment quickly makes Anna willing to do stuff she feels or felt morally uncomfortable with, and her intense feelings about her boss combine to make the whole thing subtly dreadful. The parallels between her work now and the things she criticises heroes for, and between her and Quantum, or between her weird bad boss relationship & Quantum’s (or Accelerator’s), are interesting and do make me like this book a lot more. And you know, showing the relationship between her and Leviathan as fucked up but still not pulling away from it or plainly condemning it is a balance I do kind of wish more ‘this dangerous powerful man will kill anyone who touches me’ fantasies struck. Her relationship with her best friend feels well-observed - I believed that messy friendship, & the things she focused on when thinking about it.
That said, the fantasy Anna becomes - of someone who always knows the right quip to make the person you’re talking to uncomfortable and ‘win’ the conversation - is not one that has appealed to me since I was a late teenager, so I’m probably harsher on it than I would be otherwise. This is another book that pings the ratfic radar for me, though not as strongly as some previous. There’s a lot of numerically quantifying harm (based on real academic work), offsetting damage through donations to Greenpeace, the kind of nerd fantasies of being amazing at quips and always in control, and also creative and disgusting use of superpowers. I could just be wrong about that.
Anyway. It’s an easy read despite all that! It left me feeling frustrated but it did make me laugh a few times. If you want a competence fantasy about doing efficient, loyal spreadsheet work in a villainous organisation using your rare ability to know more than others (and your cool cybernetics) for your hot boss, causing him to reconsider his personal philosophy and you to grow as a person, read And I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You by astolat.
