I’m gonna drop any pretense of being an objective reviewer. I’m gonna let you know, right now at the outset, that I am an unabashed geekboy fan of this book, ever since I first read it thirty-plus years ago. I may even regress to a pre-adolescent boy for this post, laying in the grass in the summer sun with this book in my hands.
Killerbowl is my all-time favorite SF book as a kid!
Now, as an adult re-reading it for the first time in decades, I am happy to say it still holds up. Indeed, it offers valuable tips for any writer, and for me especially, as I am in the thick and thin of trying to get a novel and a bunch of short stories published.
As you may have guessed from the title – or that iconic (to me) front jacket drawing – it’s about a futuristic, twisted version of football.
Remember, this was published in 1975. This was the era of Rollerball. I recall reading the book by William Harrison, and was disappointed to realize that “Roller Ball Murder” was just one single short story of about a dozen in the collection. Later, I remember reading an anthology of short stories about futuristic sports, but forgot the title. In fact, the only story I remember was a life-size game of pinball where men rolled about inside the balls and vats of acid lay at the bottom of trapdoors. Futuristic pinball, yeah; it was the 70s.
If you have even a passing interest in both science fiction and football, you simply have to get this book. Go to one of those online used book sites and buy it.
[possible minor spoilers …]
The story takes place 35 years in the future, which, hey, just happens to be now. Things are different in Wolf’s world, though I understand how he could honestly have extrapolated them out from his vantage point in the early 70s. Gasoline vehicles are outlawed, so everyone bicycles. All kinds of drugs are legal, but tobacco is frowned upon. There’s been a major war in Brazil.
Some things are not different. Football is an entertainment – and moneymaking – juggernaut. Especially even more so for IBC, the International Broadcasting Company. But it’s not football as we know it. Whatever happened to the NFL – if there even was an NFL in this world – we don’t know; but now 80 percent of households tune in on a weekly basis to watch the SFL, the Street Football League. Big, big money.
Football is quite different from the game we see every Sunday. For starters, it’s not played on a field. It’s played in an abandoned section of the hosting city, two dozen square blocks or more. Nothing within the perimeter is out of bounds. Rushers regularly dart into empty stores and apartment buildings. It’s not uncommon to tackle a man on a window ledge.
The game lasts twenty-four hours, midnight to midnight. Quarters are five-and-a-half hours long with half-hour breaks between. Scores resemble more those found at the end of a basketball game, like 120-103, than an NFL score.
All the players function as both offense and defense. Oh, and all the players are armed. Mostly with short clubs and knives, but the occasional bolo or spear makes an appearance. There is also the hidden safety, who carries a rifle and is given one single bullet at the start of every game. The hidden safety often camps out in the upper floors of highrises. He is the only player who is allowed to be off-sides, so he can be anywhere. Hidden safeties are usually recruited from military special forces or death row.
Thus, an important quarterback stat is LPR, which stands for Lost Player Ratio.
Each team has a mediman, a uniformed medic, who technically isn’t part of the game. He can’t carry the ball or tackle an opponent. His job is to treat, much like a field medic in, say, Viet Nam, any player injured during play. The first thing the mediman does is red-flag the downed man; once a player has that red flag on him, he can’t be attacked further.
The novel takes place between Superbowls XX and XXI. As a side note, I’ve always wondered about two things: one, how did Wolf get permission to use the word “Superbowl” – surely that’s a word that’s trademarked to infinity; and two, what had happened in this world that something like two dozen Superbowls vanished in that 35-year gap?
Our hero is T.K. Mann, quarterback of the San Francisco Prospectors. A thirteen-year vet who also wears the number 13 on his jersey, he’s looking for revenge after taking an agonizing beating in XX by Harv Matision and the New England Minutemen. Odd, isn’t it, how on-the-mark Wolf is envisioning New England dominating football. Anyway, Matision is an upstart hothead, kinda like a psychotic cross between Terrell Owens and Clubber Lang. IBC doesn’t need to tinker with this hate-hate relationship for ratings, but as Matision is the future of the sport, they’re firmly in his camp.
But that’s not to say that IBC is immune from wanting to do more for profits. This is the 70s, so corporations had higher doses of Perceived Evil Quotient than they do now. (There are also two Senators featured in the story; the democrat, naturally, is the good senator while the republican is the eeevil one, in IBC’s pocket. But I nitpick …) They lobby for expanding the league from 32 to 64 teams. They want the hidden safety to have four bullets per game instead of one. But that’s not enough. They also want to put a ringer on each team, a player who has secretly had an electronic device implanted in his head to receive tips and instructions from the IBC booth to make the game spicier. And make the outcomes more favorable from a ratings and profits point of view.
Illegal and immoral, but the über-materialistic president of IBC is going full-force ahead. He even has someone murdered to keep these hidden ringers secret.
Mann and Matision are manipulated – on and off the field – for that inevitable rematch in Superbowl XXI. But Mann is tipped off to IBC’s nefarious plot by members of EBS, an organization devoted to Ending Blood Sports. At first dismissive, he realizes the terrible truth when something particularly awful happens to him at the hands of the network. Pretty soon Mann learns he is to be killed by Matision at the conclusion of the championship game.
How can you stay away from a book like this? I’m amazed it hasn’t been filmed, except for the possibility that it could just be a legitimately unfilmable story.
It’s a quick read at around 50,000 page-turning words. I recall my dad putting the book away in an evening way back when pre-teen me had the book home from the library. Anyway, Killerbowl is not just a unique, tight and tidy, gripping story. There are a couple of things about this book that are very enlightening from a technical point of view.
This was the first book I read written in the present tense. A surreal experience for young me. It’s a rare form of narrative technique; perhaps five percent of the books I read are in first-person. But it brings an immediacy, an over-arching sense of action to the plot, and it helps personalize the story. I’m surprised more literature isn’t written in this style.
Structurally, Killerbowl consists of 160 pages of two or three page vignettes or scenes, taking place throughout the year 2010. Every dozen or so pages, we’re submerged in the heat and action of Superbowl XXI, the game itself. So, if you imagine the novel consisting of scenes a to z, with a being Mann’s beating in XX and z being the climactic XXI, the novel can be diagrammed as
z1, a, b, c, z2, d, e, f, g, z3, h, i, z4, j, k, l, etc, etc.
That’s the type of chronology the book follows. Useful, because it serves to get you hooked on two levels: You gotta find out how XXI ends, and you gotta find out what happens between XX and XXI. One serves to fuel the other and vice versa. It’s that snake eating itself thing.
Each two or three page scene functions perfectly. You writers have long heard the rule to cut anything that does not serve to push the story forward or develop character. Well, each scene does one or the other. The sport is fully fleshed out in a number of varying ways: Mann talking up a female fan, quoted sections from Prospector’s coach Herb Carrera’s book on football, IBC memos, man-on-the-street interviews, even a report from a psychology journal on the “healthiness” of a nation hooked on Street Football. Other scenes develop Mann’s character – he drives a forbidden Porsche; he leases the farmland of his deceased parents from a hostile, oppressive government – and, to a lesser extent, Matision’s.
There’s a Superbowl XXI pseudo-appendix consisting of the rosters of the two Superbowl teams, an exposition on their strengths and weaknesses, and a street map of the game. I wish there was a final standings column. For some reason I always wanted to know the names of the other teams. While re-reading the book, I noted Wolf mentions eight:
San Francisco Prospectors
New England Minutemen
Chicago Hawks
Fort Worth Devils
Honolulu Sharks
Mobile Greys
Juneau Midnights
Seattle (name of team not given)
I give Killerbowl a rare A+, but, like I said at the beginning, I can’t be objective with this book. But I think I did as best I could.
For those out of the loop, Gary Wolf’s fourth book was a little work called Who Framed Roger Rabbit? A few years later it was made into that smash movie, and though I saw it back in the theaters way back then, I didn’t make the authorial connection until about ten years ago.
For those still interested, I reviewed Wolf’s The Resurrectionist, here.
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