I thoroughly enjoyed Matt Dinniman’s new space opera book, Operation Bounce House, racing through the nearly 11-hour audiobook (engagingly narrated by Travis Baldree and Jeff Hays) in just a few days. I’d read his first Dungeon Crawler Carl book this fall, thanks to all the hype, and found it an entertaining, albeit pretty silly, action-adventure romp. So I reserved a couple more of Dinniman’s books via the Libby app, and this one came up first.
Operation Bounce House is more grounded and more thoughtful than Dungeon Crawler Carl, but just as exciting. There are elements that will feel very familiar (a man and his world are pitched into unexpected battles for survival against overwhelming outsiders, and the fighting is gamified), but this future is a lot more believable and realistically threatening than DCC’s Hitchhiker’s Guide-style absurdities. Moreover, protagonist Oliver, unlike Carl, is a man with a sister, a girlfriend, a band, and an entire community whom he loves and who love him back, and so a lot more than just his own survival is on the line. Moreover, about halfway through the book, revelations deepen the backstory and heighten the stakes even more.
Oliver is a third-generation farmer on New Sonora, a colony world where a jumpgate back to Earth has finally been built, so everyone expects life to get easier soon. He’s used to sticking his head in the sand, trying to ignore his sister Lulu’s remote sex work and his girlfriend Rosita’s hints about marriage and her conspiracy theories about the wave of ailments that almost killed off the colony in its second generation. He’s been abetted in this complacency by Roger, a superior house-robot that runs the “Honeybee” farm robots, taught Oliver and Lulu as kids, and continues disciplining them for cursing even as adults because Oliver’s grandfather never turned off the education mode before he died. (Oliver feels a lot like the not-too-bright protagonists of a lot of Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels, right down to the smart girlfriends who are inexplicably attracted to them. But the themes here are anticolonial and anticorporate, among others.)
Oliver’s outlook changes drastically when word comes from Earth, first that the colonists are being evicted, next that they’ve been labeled terrorists and slated for extermination. But the corporation that took the eviction contract has found a way to make even more money off it, by letting Earth gamers pay for the privilege of remotely piloting the mechas doing the extermination. The corporation filters what the gamers see, by erasing the little kids and old people from their screens and adding weapons to the imagery of the remaining, usually fleeing, colonists. Moreover, since during initial communications, the colonists had explained about how they used genetic treatments to save their third generation, the gamers are also exulting about killing mutants and “saving” this planet for the “pure human” immigrants to come. (The fact that many of these colonists have brown skin and Hispanic names doesn’t help, either.)
But Oliver and his friends turn out to be surprisingly resistant to extermination, especially after Roger helps them turn the agricultural robots into fighters. Some communication is maintained with people on Earth, although the corporation and government dismiss the colonists’ cries for mercy as terrorist hoaxes. And when the threat of genocide unlocks some of Roger’s latent programming, things get REALLY interesting.
Honestly, though, about halfway through the book, I was starting to feel like the book ought to be wrapping up pretty soon. I was wondering whether random aliens would come onto the scene to provide more plot, but Dinniman exceeded my expectations. It turned out that he had been planting the seeds all along for the second half of the plot, and they ended up burgeoning with exciting and triumphant, but also downright chilling results. Some tragic things happen in the book, but the ending is relatively happy … for now. I don’t believe there will be a sequel, since Dinniman’s website lists this as a standalone novel, but I don’t think Oliver will be sleepwalking through life anymore.
Operation Bounce House, by Matt Dinniman, was released Feb. 10, 2026.
Content warnings: Massacres, deaths, sexual references, identity theft, lots of cursing.
Comparisons: Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, and Edward Ashton’s Mal Goes to War.
Disclaimers: None. I love libraries!
