Game of the Gods: An ambitious but unsatisfying dystopian adventure

Game of the Gods by Jay Schiffman

Hundreds of years in our world’s future, dystopia prevails, at least in the nation called the Federacy. Judge Max Cone, with a stellar career as a military commander behind him, has spent the last fourteen years as a high judge. One of his duties is to interview young people who want to become formal citizens of the Federacy, guaranteeing them freedom. Most are rejected, sent to border settlements where life is perilous. Now Max is biding his time, taking care of his beloved wife and three young children and quietly planning his personal revenge on the governmental officials who ordered the procedure that essentially lobotomized his wife, a gifted scientist whose research findings threatened the Federacy.

Tensions with other nations and powerful rebel groups are high. While at the trial of a thirteen year old girl named Pique, a citizenship candidate who decided to prove her nearly inhuman talent as a fighter by tying Max up, Max gets kidnapped by a representative of the Federacy’s supposed ally, the Nation of Yerusalom. He finds himself pulled in different directions by various factions who want to use him and his skills and famous name for their own political and military purposes. Max sometimes cooperates, but often pushes back. Despite his jaded view of politics, he has a deep determination to do what he thinks is best. When a shocking tragedy occurs, Max becomes more deeply involved with these powerful forces who want to change the world to fit their vision … in ways that might be disastrous.

Game of the Gods (2018), a debut novel by Jay Schiffman, started out fairly interesting for me, with a combination of action/adventure and conspiracies. Max is a reluctant hero who finds himself deeply enmeshed in a complex web of political and religious scheming, and he’s surrounded by some intriguing secondary characters. The first person/present tense narration was a drawback, though; it never ceased to feel clunky.

Around the one-third mark I really started to disengage. It began with a team-building exercise for a planned rescue mission that is, rather suspiciously, comprised entirely of young woman ― except for Max. He resists the multiple sexual come-ons heroically, but hey, what’s a guy to do when the women pin him down and force hallucinogenic drugs into his mouth? My eyes were rolling SO hard. Max never seems too exercised about it (partly because the girls give him another drug to cloud his memories of what happened) but it’s a highly dubious combination of ritualized sexual fantasy and guy rape.

Game of the Gods never recovered from that point. The plot gets more fragmented and unwieldy, and Schiffman’s writing style is rather choppy and frequently heavy-handed. At one point there’s a truly startling leap in time: a chapter ends with a tension-filled scene ― cherished characters dying! traitors being executed! ― and at the very start of the next chapter Max suddenly awakes from a medically-induced coma to find that six months have passed. It felt like Schiffman wanted to shift the action forward in time and thought this was a convenient way to achieve that goal, but it came across as inept.

Game of the Gods ends without any real resolution. Though it’s not being marketed as the first book in a series, I can only surmise that a sequel is intended; otherwise the ending is incredibly dissatisfying. If there is a sequel, though, I won’t be reading it.