“It’s the fate of all creators: they fall in love with their creations.”

The maker-creation binary is at the heart of Eve & Adam, the latest release from YA authors Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate. However, it’s not as simple as this snappy sentence above might suggest.

The fact that these words are spoken by Terra Spiker, a woman who treats her daughter Eve with about as much care and affection as Dr Frankenstein did his monster, and who simultaneously merrily presides over a company whose secret project involves vat-grown humans, is testament to that.

Grant and Applegate are known for exploring often challenging themes and questions within what might be taken superficially as slight, action-oriented novels for young adults, and Eve and Adam is no different. It’s not a subtle novel, but then, neither was Frankenstein and, hey, neither was Genesis. There’s plenty of slick science, plenty of action, and plenty of fast-talking teen banter, sure. But in addition to all of this there’s a thorough exploration of what it means to fill the various maker roles, what it means to be a creation, and the conflicts that spring up between the two.

We meet Eve (an abbreviation of Evening, a name that which offers a notable contrast to the meanings we take from Eve) as she hurtles through the air after a terrible accident. Although her injuries are severe, including the loss of a leg, she’s taken to her billionaire mother’s headquarters, where with the help of teen employee Solo, she quickly recuperates. Far too quickly, actually. Eve has her suspicions that something’s not quite right about the whole thing, as does Solo, whom we learn has been adopted by Terra Spiker after being orphaned. Solo is on a mission to bring down Spiker Biopharmaceuticals, and it’s a mission he becomes even more passionate about when he learns that Eve has been given a holiday project involving creating a perfectly lifelike simulation of a human. Because with Spiker’s hazy ethical track record, there’s every likelihood that this simulation’s going to be a little too real for comfort.

The plot unfolds fairly much as you expect it will, and to be honest I was a little disappointed by the book’s narrative bluntness. The various character reveals worked well enough (no one is who they seem), although there were several elements that just didn’t quite sit right with me. The reasoning behind Solo’s involvement at Spiker Biopharm felt a little hazy, and I couldn’t quite suspend disbelief during the action scenes that took place outside the Spiker headquarters. I found the subplot involving Eve’s creation quite weak as well: it didn’t seem to build with any real rhythm, and simply felt as though it ebbed away at the end. This is, as far as I know, the first in a series, but even so I didn’t quite feel that the resolution quite worked.

Perhaps my biggest bugbear with the whole book was the use of sexually overt misogyny to belittle the female teen characters. This was baffling to me, particularly given that the women in this book are otherwise empowered. I simply can’t imagine a women of Terra Spiker’s status letting loose with a constant barrage of “sluts” and “whores” when talking about her daughter’s friend. “You have one friend and she’s a drunken slut,” she sneers at one point; this language is repeated over and over. Gratuitous misogyny is also an issue during the book’s climax, where our Evil Scientist character gloatingly says to Solo: “You haven’t tapped that little piece yet?” Why is it that antagonists are so often rendered as being sexually deviant, and why, in such a gratuitous manner? Honestly, if you’re going about kidnapping people and generally being awful, I will quite readily conclude that you’re not a nice person without being slugged with an additional cheap misogynistic blow.

These issues aside, however, I did enjoy the exploration of the different maker-creator notions–the creator, the birth mother, and the adoptive mother–and the fact that almost all of the major characters filled at least two of these. When stitched together, a fascinating web of maker-creator connections arises, and the tension around each of these is so palpable that you can almost hear it humming. Of the main characters, it’s Terra and Eve who experience the most different connections, and perhaps it’s this that also leads to their ever more conflicted relationship. When Eve effectively adopts her friend Aislin, for example, it’s a relationship that resonates both through Eve and through Terra as well. She also adds additional depth to her relationship between herself and her “Adam” by giving him a name–something that Frankenstein fails to do to his own monster.

Eve’s conflict over creating Adam is also fascinating, particularly as she’s playing the God role while Aislin, playing that of the devil, hovers over her shoulder urging her to ignore her natural desire for balance and to embrace what’s effectively a sort of creative hedonism. “Everyone should have flaws,” thinks Eve. “Isn’t that what makes us interesting?” Aislin, on the other hand, thinks that it’s inevitable that Eve should seek out perfection in her creation, after all, she does as much when she’s contemplating guys to date. As she continues her work, Eve begins to appreciate the challenge of creation:

“I could make him reckless and bold. He might die younger. He might be a criminal. He might be a great creative mind. This is not the simple, fun artwork of making a face and a body…this isn’t as simple as it looks.”

Interestingly, her creation is done beneath the shadow of Terra, who’s almost frighteningly goddess-like (and I do love that the creators in this book, as alluded to by the book’s title, are female). Whatever creative affordances Eve has in her little lab, they’re nothing compared with those of Terra. Her name’s evocative enough, but the fact that she’s a billionaire who has no concept of money works as a parallel to some sort of supreme being with infinite resources at their fingertips. However, as we did in Frankenstein we learn that there are vast differences between the different types of creation, and the relationships that arise between the different types of creator-maker binaries. Is it possible to love something that has been constructed? Or to be truly loved by something you’ve created naturally?

When you reach the last page of Eve & Adam, it’s hard not to flick back to the first page and re-read Eve’s thoughts on dying:

“When you die…you should be thinking about love…you should not be thinking about an apple.”

 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars (good)

With thanks to Hardie Grant Australia for the review copy

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“One of the luckiest accidents in my wife’s life is that she happened to marry a man who was born on the 26th of September,” begins John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos. “But for that we should both of us undoubtedly have been at home in Midwich on the night of the 26th-27th, with consequences which, I have never ceased to be thankful, she was spared.”

It’s interesting that in so many dystopian novels, or novels that contain dystopian elements, the protagonist is shunted forwards into the hero space. Our protagonist is so often the one that rails against whatever nightmarish situation is unfolding, the one who, for whatever reason, has the metier to triumph.

Wyndham, on the other hand, looks very much towards not only the ordinary, but often the uninvolved. In The Day of the Triffids, for example, the protagonist misses being part of a global blindness pandemic by virtue of being held up in hospital. In The Midwich Cuckoos, Richard and Janet Gayford happen to be away on the night that a mysterious force descends upon the town of Midwich in what becomes known as the “Dayout” event, an event that effectively freezes the population in time–and after which every female resident of child-bearing age, Janet excepted, finds herself pregnant.

The extreme ordinariness of Wyndham’s protagonists, their almost irrelevance in the scheme of things is, I think, in part what makes his books so chilling. When we have a heroic protagonist at the helm of things, it’s easy for a book to feel vicarious and removed. Those sorts of circumstances affect other people, after all. Other people who aren’t us. Wyndham’s, in contrast, have very much a “there but for the grace of God go I” aspect. There’s nothing special about them. They’re just people like us.

Richard speaks the truth when he says, reflecting on the events, that “even the most ordinary-seeming day is special for someone.” But there’s an irony to it. For him the Dayout (and what an ordinary name that is) is special because it’s his birthday: for the others it’s not the ordinary thing of Richard’s birthday that’s special, but rather the Dayout event. His phrasing is so ambiguous that his irrelevance in the whole affair is hard to ignore.

Wyndham’s focus on the uninvolved doesn’t stop there, however. Non-participants Janet and Richard aside, even the town of Midwich itself is extraordinary only in its ordinariness. It’s “almost notoriously a place where things did not happen.” The narrator adds that the town “it appears, at some unknown time, simply to have occurred.” It’s a place that’s largely been ignored for a millennium or so.

Even after the Dayout, though, the town doesn’t suddenly screamingly claim a place on the map. The invasion is something that’s hushed up and kept quiet: right to the very end, and despite all that goes on, Midwich remains completely unknown. Even its possible “chosen one” status is deflected by the fact that, unbeknownst to the residents, towns all over the world have apparently been afflicted by similar occurrences. There’s something that feels so small and somehow so British about the whole scenario: the idea that unpalatable things be ignored, to be spoken of perhaps only quietly during a parlour tea. (Kazuo Ishiguro should get right on that.)

The invasion itself is disappointing in its dullness: “it had not even been an interesting experience, since the prime requisite of interesting was, after all, consciousness,” complains Mr Zellaby. Mrs Cluey’s reaction to the whole event is to complain about having her telephone call disconnected; Mr Leebody is disgruntled when his radio signal is cut off.

It’s an odd blend of denial and of a determined desire to find normalcy in distinctly unusual events. But it’s familiar: just two weeks ago, I put down a series of bloodcurdling screams outside my apartment to a drunkard fooling around. It was only when I saw the police cars outside that I began to wonder whether I’d been honest with myself about what I’d heard.

For me, this is in large part what makes the horror of the novel. It feels almost humble, almost personal in its scope, rather than the overblown Orwell- and Huxley-inspired scenarios we’ve become so familiar with. It’s terrifying because it’s such a small thing, and small things, surely, are so more easily able to occur than large things. For that reason, they’re so much more readily able to be identified with.

There are myriad themes in this one that I could spend hours teasing out–the government censorship and interference; the Darwinian aspects of these strange xenogenesis-type pregnancies, and the uneasy pre-emptive justice that the children see as essential to their survival. The idea of attempting to apply a justice system to individuals who may not be human, and indeed, what even makes a human. It’s something that brings to mind Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human; a similar notion is looked at in YA novel 1.4 by Mike Lancaster, which I reviewed recently. As a women I also found it possible to ignore what is effectively an instance of systemic rape, as well as the circumstances surrounding it. I personally took this as a representation of the sexual aggression and dominance that is wielded as a weapon against women; I also found it interesting that Wyndham depicted this in such a way that it is impossible to resort to victim-blaming.

I have to admit that when the book began using Mr Zellaby to expound these various theories, the intimate nature of the horror began to fall away slightly; the same, too, when the book zooms out to show the worldwide nature of the invasion. The sheer terror of the event is in its seeming randomness, its smallness, its closeness and its insurmountability, and by taking a step back, I did feel that some of these elements were lost.

Still, even with this weakness, the book continually asserts the lack of reason and logic and personal vendetta in all that happens. One character says, “Well, I mean, it is an adversity, isn’t it? After all, a thing like this wouldn’t happen to us for no reason, would it?” to which there are no few raised eyebrows.

Because that’s exactly the case. Things can happen (or not happen) for no good reason, and to ordinary people who don’t have the wherewithal to do anything at all about it. Because, honestly, if such a thing were to happen to you, what would you do?

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“I am the boy running around trying to tell the world that the sky is falling. And you know what? It’s not an acorn this time. The sky really is falling in.”

Peter Vincent’s father is a world-renowned scientist, the man responsible for engineering a species of mechanical bees to replace the dwindling originals. It’s an act that’s a triumph of technology over nature, and a similar attitude is pervasive throughout Peter’s world, a world where technology is the new evolution. Survival of the fittest is the old way of thinking. These days, organisms aren’t given the opportunity to evolve and adapt. Technology has seen to that. That’s why, rather than looking for ways to encourage the organic honeybee to thrive, the bee slate was simply wiped clean.

The same is true for humans. In the first in this series, 0.4 (see my review), teenager Kyle Straker watched from afar as humanity underwent an upgrade, becoming the hive-minded, linked-up beings that populate this book, which is set a millennium later. Those who skipped out on the update effectively became invisible to these new beings–incompatible file versions, perhaps. And yet, there persists a movement of people inspired by Straker’s anti-upgrade outlook who continue to attempt to live in the “old” ways. Needless to say, they’re not looked upon fondly by someone of Peter’s father’s ilk.

When Strakerite Alpha contacts Peter to warn him of a series of disappearances, Peter finds himself drawn into a new way of thinking. Quite literally, for critical thinking and analysis isn’t of particular importance in a world where information is simply fed into one’s brain through the Link. Peter, who is already beginning to question the status quo, becomes increasingly critical of the world he lives in when he learns that humanity is facing another major upgrade.

Though 1.4 is set a thousand or so years from now, its themes are today’s. Much is made of media monopoly, of the fact that the masses not only receive their information from a strictly limited number of sources, but also that they only receive that information those media providers wish to relay. ”I’ve started to doubt the wisdom of drawing one’s opinions from the same data well every day,” says Peter at one point. At another, he reflects that it’s not just the informational content that’s a problem. It’s that people trust it, and are unable to think critically about it.

“The process of reading a book takes a while to get used to,” he muses. “It’s so slow and laborious. But once you get into it, once you forget the way you’re reading and concentrate on what you’re reading, it becomes a really unique experience. You have to work to draw meaning from it rather than having a meaning given to you, which is the only way we receive information these days.”

The reliance on these sources as a form of memory is also a compelling issue, and one that those who’ve stopped bothering to memorise telephone numbers or addresses or dates will find familiar. “We have stopped remembering things. We trust the Link to remember them for us.” It’s the present-day version of the problem raised in Wyndam’s The Day of the Triffids, where specialisation has meant that people need others in order to be able to survive. There’s a huge degree of trust involved, and even more so when it’s memory that we’re talking about; there are certainly Orwellian overtones here.

There’s also the idea of depersonalisation and alienation, which is widely present in dystopian fiction–of which this is a beautiful example–and which is so very relevant to us today. It’s the making of artificial, largely meaningless social connections via electronic media and the pretence that they’re a suitable substitute for actual, real-world relationships. It’s the idea of being so overrun and over-scheduled that taking a backseat to one’s life is the easiest way to cope.

“We need to feel like we belong. The Link provides us with all the connections we need. So much so that we pretty much let it run our lives for us. It’s how we make sense of the world. So we look for patterns and linkages, because without them the world is a senseless blur.”

I did find that the epistolary format created a certain distance between the narrator and reader, and one that’s largely “telling”. There is a certain recursion of plot (although this is more than likely intended), and some elements, such as Alpha’s instant affinity for Peter, felt a little hasty. But overall, 1.4 is a compelling and thought-provoking addition to the dystopian genre.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars (and leaning towards a 4) (very good)

With thanks to Hardie Grant Egmont Australia for the review copy

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I’ve always said to my husband that if I ever degenerate to a state where I’m no longer self-aware, or where my dignity no longer remains, then it’s time to pull the plug on my life. After all, what kind of life would it be when I’m no longer me? Would I even truly be living?

Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies is a book that explores the notion of what it means to be alive, but in the most unexpected of ways: it’s a book that examines life, in particular the notion and value of a human life, through the lens of death.

Our protagonist and surprisingly eloquent narrator is R, a chap who enjoys listening to Frank Sinatra, getting about in snappy smart casual clothing, and eating people’s brains. R may be incapable of articulating more than a few syllables at a time, and perhaps enjoys riding the escalators at the airport a tad too much, but his internal world is one of Proustian grandiloquence, and much of R’s time is spent reflecting on the existence and purpose of his zombie community.

And indeed it’s not merely a community, but a culture of its own, with a (pidgin) language, political structure, and even sophisticated social norms relating to eating, romantic engagement, and even the raising of children. It’s a culture that though seen by the living as something purely destructive and pestilential, is actually impressively creative and purposeful. Beyond the immediate need to survive, R’s zombie peers offer universal education to their youngsters, construct buildings and shelters, and even participate in rituals and rites such as marriage. Not too shabby for a bunch of shambling brain-munchers. (Still, I rather wish Marion had spared his readers the details of zombie sex.)

But like any culture, R’s has a thing for seeking spiritual transcendence or enlightenment, a mental and emotional escapism that’s found primarily through the devouring as brains (hey, at least it’s all natural). R, out hunting with some of his clan one night, happens across a particularly potent brain that precipitates in R something rather like a bad acid trip, or at least it’s bad from the perspective of his zombie fellows. R’s brain tab, however, has done two things: it’s caused him to immediately become smitten with the non-zombie Julie, and it’s created in him a new-found sense of agency, causing him to wonder whether zombie-ism might not simply be the result of a severe case of deficit thinking.

I should probably note here that although the book begins with something along the lines of zombies at Woodstock, the rest is ripped from the arms of the great Bard himself, and is largely a retelling of Romeo and Juliet against a context of Montagueian zombies and Capuletian fleshies. After all, what greater barrier is there to love than that of life itself? Although the book does, in a way, retrace the tragic footsteps of those famous starcrossed lovers, Marion offers a cleverly and somewhat humorously subverted version of events that is surprisingly optimistic.

But Warm Bodies is that kind of book. It’s a book that should be offputting and alienating, as truly, is there anything less appealing than a decaying lover (and indeed, a decaying lover with British teeth. Good grief)? But instead, it’s somehow affirming, and welcomingly self-deprecating: there’s a good deal of humour in these pages, and the book is stronger for it. R happily communicates through the Beatles and Sinatra while his living counterparts mourn the loss of the arts in the face of their need to survive.

The book thus merrily pits the fearful humans against their zombie counterparts in not just a physical battle, but an existential one, too, asking throughout where the dividing marker between human and not human should sit, as well as that between living and not living. And perhaps it’s not so surprising when so many of the living humans are relieved when the plug is pulled on their own lives.

Warm Bodies is not a subtle book, but then zombies aren’t exactly known for their propriety and indirectness. There are regular sections throughout where Marion cheats by breaking his first person narration, bringing in flashbacks and “editable” memories in order to allow the book to achieve a scope not otherwise possible, and bringing in the articulate human characters feels like a contrived way to speed up the narrative, but overall this is a wonderful read–even if I am still rather averse to the idea of kissing a zombie.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars (excellent) 

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Oddly enough, the day I began reading 172 Hours on the Moon I also read that Neil Armstrong had agreed to give a rare interview, a coup wrangled by an accountant, of all people. The Armstrong interview was newsworthy in that he has been famously tight-lipped about his experience on the moon, helping to fuel conspiracy theories about whether we’ve been told the truth about the circumstances surrounding the moon landing–or whether the moon landing ever happened in the first place. It’s this sort of scepticism that 172 Hours on the Moon exploits, positing that the various space programmes around the world have fallen by the wayside for reasons that we, the public, have never been told. But, of course, none of which can be benign.

In the novel, a lottery is held to send a trio of teenagers to the moon as a way of rekindling interest in the NASA programme and therefore securing further funding (which will in turn result in some moustache-twirling evilness, we’re told by evil Dr Blank at the beginning of the book). The teens have their various reasons for entering the lottery, but they generally fall under the heading of escapism, rather than, oh, actually wanting to go to the moon. Of course, given that the entire moon trip comprises roughly three weeks, the teens in question could probably have come up with a slightly easier way to run away from home. But anyway.

Fishy things begin to occur before the teens head off on their moon trip, with various telegraphed weirdnesses including the recounting of several Japanese horror stories pinched straight from the gazillions of straight-to-DVD Japanese horror films I watched as a uni student; a homeless guy with a shopping trolley offering thinly-veiled warnings; and various POV switches to people involved with earlier moon flights who had lived to tell the tale (but, of course, just barely).

When the teens do arrive at the moon, the point at which the book ostensibly begins, but which actually occurs more than half-way through, there’s the disconcerting sense of reading a combined novelisation of Moon, Event Horizon and Aliens. The government nefariousness suddenly turns into something much more eerie, and though it’s a chilling enough situation, it feels massively disconnected from the first half of the book–other than the prologue jammed on to the front to give some sort of validity to this awkward shift in plot. And I must say that I’m getting a little tired of the ol’ getting-sucked-out-of-the-space-capsule death scene.

172 Hours on the Moon is painfully awkward in a number of ways: the main conceit of sending teenagers to the moon as a PR stunt, for example, is a bit of a head-scratcher to begin with, particularly given the motivations behind it. Sure, I’ll buy Laika the dog in space, but I’m fairly sure that the idea of sending a bunch of minors up into relatively untested waters is fairly likely to be vetoed by any sort of sane government-sponsored body. Especially when we find out just why space travel has become a thing of the part.

The pacing and plot are all over the place as well, with, the aforementioned issues regarding the story kicking in late and the bizarre “warnings” that seem to be desperately trying to link the second half of the book to the first, but don’t succeed in doing so. Even the tone of the book shifts dramatically half-way through, with an ending that feels a lot more like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or 28 Days Later than it does anything to do with a moon landing, and a key character who just kind of…vanishes.

On the more micro-level, the prose fails to inspire, and the dialogue is much the same–although admittedly this may be a translation issue. The book is also littered with illustrations and sketches that distract from rather than add to the experience, and to be honest, it’s hard not to feel that there’s something very amateurish about this entire production.

As a bit of a sci-fi buff, I have to say that I was disappointed by this one, and I’m not sure that I’d seek out anything else by this author.

Snippet:

“These should work for up to fifteen hours,” he said, handing a flashlight to each of them. The flashlights were big and heavy. They reminded Mia of small versions fo the theatrical lights her band used at concerts. They could only just barely carry them in one hand. Coleman took down two extras from the shelves and turned one of them on.

“I need to tell you two something,” he began. “It might be important. It has to do with that code the machine gave you, 6EQUJ5. That’s not just any code or an error. It’s a signature. A signal.”

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars (serious flaws)

With thanks to Hachette Australia for the review copy

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In order to intelligently discuss this book, I’m going to discuss some elements of this book that you may consider to be “spoilers”. But really, if you’re afraid of spoilers, why are you reading reviews anyway?

Though Daisy Appleby is surely the world record holder for Most Times Deceased and Revived, she’s not going to end up in the Guinness Book of World Records anytime soon. Why? Because Daisy wasn’t brought back by something as mundane as CPR or a defibrillator machine. She was brought back by a top-secret drug that’s still in its preliminary testing stages. The kind of drug that has the possibility to utterly change not just the finality of death, but the way people live their lives. After all, if you knew that you could be brought back to life with not even the merest of side-effects, wouldn’t you do things differently?

But though Daisy may be a little blithe when it comes to things like bringing her Epipen to school or balancing precariously atop a section of cliff-top railing, for the most part Daisy wants nothing more than to be normal. Being a part of a top-secret testing regimen means that each time something happens that may compromise the anonymity of the project, Daisy and her “parents”, two programme operatives, have to move elsewhere, assuming new identities each time. It’s a life that could be likened to being a part of a military family, or perhaps someone in a witness protection programme.

Having been revived from her fifth death and accordingly shunted off to a new home in Omaha, Daisy is determined to live a normal life not overshadowed by thoughts of death or the rigorous testing required by the programme. For the first time in her life, Daisy begins to reach out to others, and she finds herself not only with a best friend with whom she has everything in common, but with a maybe-boyfriend as well. But when it turns out that Daisy’s new best friend is suffering from terminal cancer, she finds herself facing a tremendous ethical battle. How is it fair that Daisy has access to the Revive drug whenever it’s needed, and yet others such as her best friend are not able to access it at all? And why are such trials being undertaken clandestinely, out of the view of the public? What does this mean for the future of the drug and the public’s ability to access it should they need it? Or is death something that is universal unless one has the money and means to make a choice otherwise?

Revived is beautifully and movingly written, and Patrick’s strong characterisation allows her to explore not only these questions, but also related themes, such as the cultural taboo of death and sickness–Audrey, for example, is shunned by her peers, while Daisy, who appears physically healthy, is accepted by them–and the human response to the loss of a loved one–something that Daisy has not before experienced first-hand, but rather has (at times selfishly) been the cause of.

But yet, despite a strong set-up, Revived doesn’t quite hang together. There are parts where things seem to happen too easily: those Daisy tells about the Revived program are immediately receptive to the idea, rather than treating it with a degree of scepticism, for example. And the ease with which she is able to access top-secret programme files doesn’t feel realistic. I also found the pacing in the latter half of the book an issue: the book seems to shift gear half-way through, changing from a quiet, almost literary pace to one a good deal faster, with a sudden dash to Texas culminating in an action film-esque ending that involves a sniper and a scene involving a bees’ nest that, given how the book opens, is just far too neat to be believable.

Still, these issues aside, Patrick has a knack for coming up with intelligent high-concept ideas, and the writing chops to make something of them. I suspect that with a few more novels under her belt she’ll be very good indeed.

Your turn: Would you live your life differently if you knew that you could be brought back from the dead?

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars (good)

With thanks to Hardie Grant Egmont for the review copy

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 Note: this review is for book five in a series, and will no doubt contain spoilers

Regular readers of this site will know that both my husband and I are ardent fans of Michael Grant’s Gone series. And the recently released Fear, the penultimate volume in the sextet, is quite possibly my favourite outing in this excellent series yet.

It’s been more than a year since the adults in Perdido (“Lost”) Beach vanished, leaving the town’s youth to fend for themselves. What follows is a survival scenario worthy of The Lord of the Flies, and Grant continuously pushes it into ever more disconcerting, discomforting territories. There’s the brutality involved in forging an existence in a landscape that no longer obeys the natural laws the youth are used to; there’s the ongoing struggle for power, and for some semblance of democracy; there’s the looming threat of a greater evil that lurks at the boundaries of their world.

And now there’s the threat of utter darkness.

And it’s this, more than anything that strikes fear into the heart of the survivors. Think the utter terror involved in John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, for example: a threat that would otherwise be manageable in a sighted world becomes impossible in a world where sight is taken away. Humans, after all, are so very reliant on sight—it’s arguably our strongest sense and one that we need for our very survival. Basic tasks such preparing food, moving around, finding somewhere to sleep, or keeping safe from others, are almost insurmountable without it. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that so many of us are afraid of the dark, particularly in our youth.

And when it comes to Grant’s Fear, it’s the youth we’re talking about.

When the dome that covers what was once Perdido Beach begins to darken, the kids know that it’s only a matter of time before they’re thrust into darkness and the tentative of civilisation they’ve worked so hard to build is swept away.

Fear is also palpable not only in the children’s fear of the dark, but also in what that fear means: it’s the fear of the unknown, the fear of what our imaginations can conjure. There’s some truth to that old adage about not showing a monster’s face in a film because whatever we can imagine will be so much worse than whatever the set designer can come up with. Grant uses this to extraordinary effect with the vicious character of Penny, who can conjure up oh-so-real illusions–both good and bad, but with a clear preference for the horrific. Everyone is constantly reminded that their fear is all in their heads, but that’s what makes it so awful.

Fear of these personal demons marks a turning point for a number of the characters, and with Fear Grant positions the series for what can only be a tremendous conclusion.

New characters fight for power, undermining the delicate political systems; others, such as Astrid the “Genius” change substantially, with survival at all odds at the top of their agenda. Others again, those (unnamed!) characters) known for their cruelty and ends-justifies-the-means outlooks, are allowed to reign if it means possible survival in the face of the darkness to come. And somehow, Grant manages to use their newfound weakness to paint them in a surprisingly sympathetic light.

Where some characters continue to turn towards the darkness or to struggle with their inner demons, others, such as Quinn, who at the beginning of the series was known for his cowardice, continue to prove themselves in this world. Edilio, too, a bad-boy illegal, as he paints himself, remains a steadfast force for good. As has been the case throughout the series, it’s the characters who don’t have special X-Men like powers who seem most at ease with their new existence and most able to succeed against the odds. And often, these are the very characters who are so often done away with in the early scenes of a horror film or novel—the minorities, the trangressors, the outcasts.

Fear also gives us a glimpse of what’s beyond the dome, and while I don’t want to give too much away here, I’m hotly anticipating what comes of this in the final volume of this consistently excellent series.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars (exellent)

With thanks to Hardie Grant Egmont Australia for the review copy

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If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from watching American TV, it’s that Americans really do like their guns. Or really, anything that makes other stuff go boom. If Jules Verne’s humorous novella From the Earth to the Moon is anything to go by, this is a widely observed fact, and has been for a good deal of time now.

The novella cheekily reflects on a post-civil war environment where all the guns, munitions and artillery are lain down in the name of peace, leaving plenty of gun-totin’ Americans feeling a tad impotent.

But another thing I’ve learned about Americans (also from TV) is that the right to congregation is something held in high regard. So it’s no surprise then when the gun-lovers of Baltimore get together to create the Baltimore Gun Club in order to angst over the dearth of things left to blow up. A touch of existential angst is in order, and the club sits about lamenting the uselessness of them thar shootin’ machines. Until club president Impey Barbicane shows his impish side and suggests a use for the weapons and weaponry knowledge presently going unused: to build a giant cannon and shoot a rocket to the moon in order to conquer it as the newest of the US states.

Ah, nothing like space exploration being inspired not out of any scientific desire but purely out of the need for destruction and a desperate desire to prove that one’s cannon is bigger than one’s competitor’s. (Indeed, Barbicane quite hilariously states, “There is no one among you, my brave colleagues, who has not seen the Moon, or, at least, heard speak of it.” highlighting the utter lack of scientific inclination of those involved).

After this, the specifications are worked out and funding is sought from worldwide. Impressively enough, Barbicane and his cronies manage to snag some solid funding from just about everyone save for England (who feared that contributing to such a thing would be interventionist), and the race is on. The novel ends, however, with a slight twist: rather than simply shooting an empty rocket into space, said rocket ends up being manned, with the question of what happens to these passengers left up in the air (although presumably they survive given that there’s a sequel to this called Around the Moon. And as much as Verne rather likes writing chapters entirely free of characters, surely he wouldn’t write an entire book in such a way.)

From the Earth to the Moon is both a slight volume and a simple one, and doesn’t have the enduring appeal of his adventure narratives, in part because our present has diverged so far from that which he describes in the book (and er, also because of Verne’s trade-mark university lecture-esque chapters). But at the same time, there are an extraordinary number of parallels between the mission as described in the book and that of the Apollo 11 launch. There are also a number of thematic elements here that intrigue. The fact that the science, although certainly present, is secondary to the desire for colonisation or plain ol’ blowing things up; and the fact that the Americans’ efforts gain almost universal appeal from the rest of the world. There’s such optimism here: rather than a space race, it’s a solo flight cheered on by those with absolutely nothing to gain from the matter.

Similarly, said optimism, or perhaps delusion, is seen in the fact that three blokes are perfectly happy with being cannon-shotted off to the moon in the vague hopes that there’ll be water and oxygen enough there to sustain them. Then again, one supposes that similarly gung-ho attitudes were applied when discovering new continents…

From the Earth to the Moon isn’t Verne at his finest, but it’s an amusing read that will have you chuckling at those crazy Americans and their obsession with the right to bear arms–for whatever reason.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars (not bad)

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In Michael Grant’s BZRK, there’s a war taking place. A war at both the macro and nano levels.

In my house, whenever a Michael Grant book arrives, a similar war takes place. The battle to be the first to read it. Unfortunately, my fiance is larger than I am, and has rather a smaller to-read pile, so his supremacy in this area is unsurpassed.

For a book to appeal to my fiance, it has to be a prototypical boy book: so fast paced you’ll get papercuts from turning the pages, filled with gore and violence, and with all sorts of nerdy, techy things. Needless to say, BZRK rated highly with him (he came to bed at 2am the day the book arrived to tell me so. Thanks for that).

The book

Pitched at a slightly older audience than the Gone series, BZRK tells the story of two competing armies fighting an invisible war to which the wider public is utterly oblivious. The stakes are high–madness and death are two of the more pleasant outcomes of the battle–and the pacing equally so. As Grant slowly inures us to his world, a sense of paranoia takes over: who is involved in the battle, and how can one tell?

Sadie and Noah are, although their recruitment is not through any particular desire of their own: Sadie joins the Berserk organisation after her brother and father are killed by the opposing side; Noah joins in part to avenge his brother, who has been institutionalised in the aftermath of his own involvement. In joining Berserk, both give up their identities–for their own safety–and are given a crash course in the manipulation of biots, creepy nanotech robots blended with DNA and thus a sort of “extension” of self.

Their mission? To take down the Armstrong Fancy Goods Corporation (a company whom I can’t help but imagine as a resaler of Hello Kitty and other cute Japanese toys, or perhaps something similar to Mom’s corporation in Futurama), which is hell-bent on, well, basically taking over the world through the assassinations of key political leaders and the eventual fusing of individuals into a collective whole.

The novel switches between the machinations of the two groups, with plenty of fighting, trapping and double-crossing at both the macro and micro levels, and it’s a rip-roaring ride overall. The pacing is classic Grant, and isn’t for those who like a quiet read accompanied by a cup of tea and a bikkie. In fact, you’ll probably come out panting.

That said, I did take a little while to get into this one, in part because of the way in which the book opens–two chapters that although retrospectively helpful in setting the scene are sort of diversionary as a beginning–and also because I struggled to identify much with the key characters. This isn’t necessarily through any fault of Grant’s, who does a tremendous job of slotting in the requisite characterisation in amongst all that battle, but I think more to do with my own tastes (my fiance, for example, adored this book through and through).

I should also note that BZRK isn’t simply a book (nor is the book a standalone), so it’s perhaps not entirely fair of me to review it as though this is all it is. Grant has attempted to create a multi-platform storytelling experience that spans across apps, an interactive website, a game, and more, and I expect that a reader who takes advantage of all of this will enjoy a more comprehensive reading experience more akin to what the author intended.

(Also, nitpicky Russian major/Clockwork Orange fan gripe note to proofreader: Anthony Burgess uses the term “krovvy” [from кровь, krov', meaning blood], not “kroovy” in his book.)

Thematic stuff

BZRK may be brimming with explosions and literary special effects, but like all of Grant’s work, it’s a good deal more than eye-candy. Amidst the Michael Bay-esque action there’s plenty for astute readers to get their teeth into.

The first is the very invisibility of the battle to outsiders and the threat that this poses. And given how much political resistance or violent action these days takes place in a way that is very much removed from the immediate physical sphere, it’s quite pertinent. Indeed, other than those directly involved in the Berserk activities, there’s a complete lack of public awareness about what’s taking place. Political and military decisions are made without the knowledge or endorsement of the public, which is something increasingly occurring in our world, where public involvement in politics is often little more than casting a vote at each election (and in the US, where voting isn’t mandatory, it may well be less so).

This invisibility/distance also raises further ethical issues. When you’re able to do battle in a way where you’re not physically at risk, where you’re pressing buttons or giving orders from somewhere far removed, would you make the same decisions that you would whilst engaged in hand-to-hand combat? There’s something dehumanising about making these sort of tactical decisions from afar (indeed, look at military terminology such as “friendly fire”; “collateral damage”; “neutralise”; “pre-emptive strike” and so on for some decidedly eerie euphemisms that point exactly to this), and Grant certainly doesn’t hesitate to raise this as an issue. One of the first scenes of the book, for example, involves a plane being brought down in a packed sports stadium. Though there are three intended victims, the overall damage is far, far greater.

(Aside: Grant also makes an interesting point when he reveals the villain(s) of the piece as a pair of conjoined twins whose appearance is described as being as physically confronting. The emphasis on the visual when it comes to the “villains” and the complete lack of the same when it comes to the invisible nanotech is an intriguing contrast, with Grant seeming to indicate that people struggle to define or identify evil/amorality when it is not visible.)

To me, perhaps the most chilling aspect of these books is the degree to which individuals are stripped of their individuality and humanity in the name of the greater good. Mind control is silently and invisibly utilised–notably to subdue women and turn them into submissive and willing creatures robbed of their agency and autonomy. Bug Man, for example, uses his nanotech skills to do exactly this to his girlfriend (or sex partner, I suppose, since it’s not exactly a reciprocal relationship). The conjoined Armstrong twins seek to create a sort of utopian hive mind to rid the world of its differences and conflict, and of course, in doing so, everything that makes us human.  Grant also touches on how a degree of amoralism and emotional absence is needed in order to succeed in the wars of the future: Bug Man is clearly rendered as an amoral character, while Vincent is described as lacking empathy and the ability to feel pleasure–he is cold, emotionless, and endlessly logical in his work.

Even the members of Beserk (the “goodies”) undergo changes that render them inhuman in various ways: they’re anonymised, given the names of deceased poets (unsurprisingly those who have met their deaths in awful ways) instead, and there’s an expectation that they’ll not only give over part of their bodies for nanotech coding, but also that they’ll be prepared to die whilst carrying out the program’s requirements. They’re also in for the long haul: once they’re in, there’s no turning back. And given that we’re talking about minors (read: child soldiers) here, this is a terrifying notion.

Overall

BZRK didn’t quite resonate with me in the way that his Gone series has, but I suspect that it’s more of a personal taste issue than any real flaw in the storytelling. Grant certainly delivers what he promises: plenty of action, a plot that doesn’t let up, tech galore and some murky ethical musings, and if you enjoy those elements in your reading material it’s fair to say that you’ll enjoy this one.

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Rating: 3 out of 5 stars (good)

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In my recent review of Chris Priestley’s Mister Creecher I mused on how humanity and physicality are inextricably tied: no matter how transcendant one aims to be intellectually, ethically, and spiritually, one’s humanity will always be judged, at the outset at least, by how well one meets the physical criteria of humanness. The idea is nothing new, and it’s one that’s been explored throughout literature, with those who are deformed or physically disabled subject to being shunned or isolated. In particular, it’s an idea that’s looked at in postapocalyptic fiction, and to a lesser extent dystopian fiction. Curiously, these deformities are always the result, whether directly or indirectly, of scientific advances: in this genre, such advances either seem to result in genetic manipulation or all-out warfare.

HG Wells, for example, warns against “godless” scientific tinkerings in The Island of Doctor Moreau (review) and The Invisible Man (review), while John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (review)  looks at a postapocalyptic society in which deformities across the entire natural world have become the norm. And there are countless novels, ranging from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale through to more recent works such Birthmarked by Caragh O’Brien (review), where systemic female sterility is the result of our intellectual foibles. It’s impossible not to see a moral dimension in these: there are echoes of The Scarlet Letter in both the Atwood and the O’Brien, and the disturbing renegotiation of the perception of women in society is starkly confronting. Similarly, Wyndham’s characters see physical deformity as a moral aberration, not sheer genetic ill-luck, and Wells spends a good deal of time examining the breakdown of humanity in the subjects of his books.

Pure, the highly anticipated dystopian release from Julianna Baggott, incorporates all of the above, with an all-encompassing approach to the genre that blends not only postapocalyptic elements but dystopian ones as well. Baggott’s world is one devastated by the “detonations”, a series of blasts designed, it seems, to wipe clean the slate of humanity in order that we can begin once more anew. A select group of “pures” is isolated within the controlled environment of a dome, while those who do not meet these criteria are left behind to fend for themselves in the desolation that follows. The parallels to World War II are palpable, with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki looming large in the shadow of the “detonations”, and the eugenics approach taken by those in power all too evident. (There is a weird irony, though, that the “pures” are ghettoed in the dome, with the rest of the world ostensibly, although admittedly more in theory than in reality, unfettered around them.)

This sense of history repeating brings to mind Walter M Miller’s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, which occurs some several hundred years after the “flame deluge”. In Miller’s classic, genetically ravaged “misborns”, also known as the “Pope’s Children”, roam the earth, and anti-intellectualism is rife, with science and learning demonised as having facilitated the nuclear holocaust. Miller’s narrative approach is cyclical, with humanity slowly rebuilding its technological prowess only to become seduced by its power once more, and there are echoes of the same happening in Pure. Not only do we see parallels between WWII and the detonations, but also the ceaseless efforts of the pures towards self-improvement. Where the wretches left behind seem, at least superficially, to be doing little more than surviving, those within the dome are constantly self-experimenting, undertaking trials to improve themselves physically and intellectually. There are echoes of Wyndham here, with the drive for perfection or purity being linked to moral superiority. And indeed, like the Wyndham there are consequences of imperfection: whole crops, for example, are destroyed if they reveal any sort of abnormality that diverges from mainstream perfection.

But the issue with the pures’ efforts to regain supremacy is that their efforts require involved artificial adaptation. They strive to recreate the agriculture and livestock of old, yet are doing so by forcing these approaches on to a landscape that is utterly changed. Moreover, their own artificial adaptations are conducted with a view to eventually being able to survive in the outside world once it is again inhabitable, but yet they’re doing so without engaging at all with this world. In contrast, it’s the wretches on the outside who are best adapted for survival. Curiously, they’ve undergone adaptation of their own (some vague thing to do with nanotech that’s resulted in their becoming “fused” to whatever organic or inorganic matter was close to them at the time of the detonations), and despite their physical deformities, are doing a surprisingly decent job of surviving in what is little more than a wasteland.

The idea of these fusings recalls of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, in which criminals are “remade” and made monstrous through terrifying amputations and Frankensteinian additions, and where there exists a group of “fReemade”, escaped “remade” criminals. In Pure, as can no doubt be extrapolated from the not-so-subtle title, these physical deviations are a political statement of sorts, and are given overwhelming emphasis–but to, in my opinion, the detriment of the plot. Astonishing amounts of page space are given over to describing the endless horrific ways in which humans can be melded with cars, children’s toys, glass, animals and even other people. So much, in fact, that this almost become the point of the book. And though there’s a hazy sense of politicisation surrounding it all, Baggott is so vague on the political context that it’s all rather meaningless.

This is unfortunately true throughout the book: there’s an odd sense of Pure being less a story and more a setting: it’s almost as though the author uses her pen to pan across the landscape rather than to allow the reader to engage with it. Perhaps, of course, that’s the point–after all, the pures look out, “benevolently, from afar”, from their domed world, but are otherwise utterly disengaged from the reality of it all. But as a reader, it does become tiresome. It takes some several hundred pages for the plot to truly kick into gear, and when it does things become increasingly shaky. Baggott uses the affordances of anti-intellectualism and revisionism to glaze over the social and political circumstances behind the detonations, but where this approach works in novels such as 1984 or Brave New World (review), where there are solidly rendered socio-political contexts and where propaganda is carefully used to manipulative effect, in Pure it simply feels like handwavium: the characters are rendered ignorant so that any concrete information need not be imparted to the reader. Baggott does seem to make her own attempt at the Two Minutes’ Hate in that there are constant repetitions and recurring motifs: protagonist Pressia’s deformed hand is mentioned more times than I can count, and the word fused is an endless refrain. The intention seems to be one of desensitisation through repetition, but the result is a book that feels painfully tautological.  The narrative voice, unfortunately, strikes with the same dullness as the endless repetition of “doll-head fist” and “fusing”: dirge-like sentences, soulless descriptions of destruction and despair, and a general wallowing hopelessness.

This repetition is true of the characters as well. Though the book switches between four points of view, two of which in my opinion are extraneous, the voice is unchanging throughout, which seems strange given that two of the point of view characters are uneducated “wretches”, while the others are hyper-privileged dome dwellers. I also found it curious that the two key “wretch” characters were only deformed in a minor way. Though those around them are scarred or changed almost beyond recognition–and often beyond function–Pressia sports a “moon-shaped” scar around one eye and a doll-head fist, while Bradwell has been fused with a flock of birds, leaving his back aflutter with wings. There’s a slightly canted sense of beauty to their deformities, and I find it interesting that the author chose two relatively unaffected characters to contrast with the “pures”.

Perhaps Pure‘s biggest strength is that it draws so strongly on much of the superb dystopian and postapocalyptic fiction that precedes it, making it a useful summation of a lengthy reading list. But as a novel in its own right, I’m afraid I feel that it doesn’t offer much that’s new–and in a genre that’s so oversaturated as this one, a book needs more than a beautifully rendered setting to truly stand out.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars (good)

With thanks to Hachette Australia for the review copy

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