In a word: skippable.

I’m genuinely tempted to make that the entire review, to be honest. This is the ninth Matt Dinniman book I’ve read, and the tenth is going to be out in March, and of the nine I’ve loved seven of them, thought the eighth (Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon) was okay, and … then there was this. I forced myself to buckle down and finish it over the course of last night and today, and to be honest I could have put it away after a hundred pages and been fine with it. It really feels like a manuscript that he had lying around and the publishing house was desperate to put something out that was trad-pubbed from the beginning, so he gave them this.

I don’t want to spend a ton of time shitting on this book, especially since it isn’t going to affect my enthusiasm for Dungeon Crawler Carl, but skippable is probably the perfect single-word review, and if I were to write a two-word review it would be half-baked. Nothing about it is particularly well thought-out, the main character is entirely indistinguishable from Carl, including his uncanny ability to come up with complicated plans on the fly, and I defy you to explain to me why the book (or the in-universe show the book is named after) is called Operation Bounce House. Everyone talks like they’re a teenager in 2020 even though the book is set hundreds of years in the future and on a planet Earth has colonized. I cannot emphasize enough how there has been no cultural change of any kind during all this time. I spent the whole book waiting for a twist where it turned out they had been on Earth the whole time and not actually in the future.

The plot: Oliver, who is Carl, is a farmer on a colony planet. The planet gets attacked by mechs being remotely piloted by, mostly, bored and wealthy teenagers on Earth who have spent lots of money to be part of a game show and may or may not realize they’re killing actual people. There’s lots of talk about how the showrunners are portraying everyone on the planet as terrorists. They fight back.

Why does this game show exist? Why are they killing people? No reason, really. Dungeon Crawler Carl earns a certain amount of “don’t think about it too hard.” This book very much does not. Nothing feels like it has been thought through.

It is not a LitRPG, by the way, even though the attackers are technically playing a game. There are no statistics or leveling up or unlocking abilities or anything of that sort; it’s more of a military sci-fi than anything else.

I have read worse books, to be sure— hell, I have read worse books in 2026— but I have no real reason to recommend that anyone else pick this up. Read Dungeon Crawler Carl, definitely. Ignore this one.