For instance, this. Or oh god, this.

Sometimes they’re zombie novels.

Yeesh.

I identified with Keri immediately because in the first chapter she explains that she likes to be prepared. She has plans for every possible disaster, keeps emergency supplies in her bedroom, that sort of thing. But of course, she does not have a plan for what to do when her beloved older brother kills himself. Unless it turns out to be murder, as her childhood friend Janna suspects. It turns out that Keri’s brother is part of a pattern of “suicides” that includes Janna’s brother, her friend Sione’s brother, and ten years’ worth of other oldest brothers, all from different parts of New Zealand, who have visited their idyllic resort town for the New Year’s festivities. The three only have a short time until New Year’s comes around again to identify this year’s victim and find the killers.

I loved Healey’s last book, Guardian of the Dead, and I loved this. For many of the same reasons: believable, flawed friendships between fully realized characters; sensitive handling of sex (and the lack thereof); a stunning sense of place. The magic felt a bit less organic here than in Guardian and required more suspension of disbelief for some reason; I kept waiting for a twist, that it wasn’t what the kids thought, but nope — it pretty much was, and was an idea we’ve all seen before, and therefore had something of a “Buffy monster-of-the-week” feel, like with established characters all of this could have happened in 50 minutes on TV.

So while this feels less original than Guardian (with the exception of the New Zealand setting, which is unusual enough to get a bunch of automatic originality points for an American audience), it was no less fun to read. I chewed through it in one day, home sick recovering from BEA. Healey is an outstanding writer with a gift for dialogue, characterization, and foreshadowing. She drops hints along the way that only seem sinister in retrospect, but doesn’t make us wait for the characters to catch up to what we’ve already figured out. And she weaves race, class, and sexuality (and, in this case, temporary disability) into the story in such a way that it feels like she’s creating real people rather than checking character traits off a PC list.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of fear in my own life, and how to avoid sacrificing long-term sanity for short-term peace of mind. I said at the beginning that I identified with Keri’s need to plan for every eventuality. At the end she says, “I still planned for possibilities, but it was easier to recognize the planning as part of the anxiety and not being about real things that might actually happen,” and it was eerily like reading words from my own head.
…

SPOILERS (which might be interesting if you’re not going to read the book, since (surprise!) I go off on a tangent)

One of my favorite things about Healey’s books is how the magic has lasting consequences — good and bad. At the end of Guardian the earthquakes had still happened and people needed to clean up afterwards. And at the end of this, people do start losing their jobs and leaving Summerton. That is the consequence of putting an end to the spell that demanded the boys as sacrifice. (It’s implied that the town is going to be okay anyway, which is maybe a cop-out considering how similar West Coast towns are described as “ghost towns.”) “Dystopia” is the big buzzword right now, but this is a dystopia in the truest sense — it aims for utopia and misses horribly, and we see that from the inside.

It made me think of Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” (If you’ve never read it, the text is behind that link. It’s very short and I think it’s pretty much required modern reading.) To what lengths are we willing to go to keep the places we love safe and prosperous? Is there any amount of sacrifice that’s worth it? We (and here I’m making some assumptions about my readership) are, of course, all citizens of Omelas or Summerton — enjoying our cheap and plentiful fuel and food and material goods at the expense of the impoverished people who create those things for us. There are ways to walk away from Omelas, to go off the grid, but almost no one does it because the pull of the comfort and safety and community is far too strong. (And because — and this is something not allowed for in the parameters of LeGuin’s story — maybe it’s better to stay and try to change things from the inside?)

I think that’s why it took people who had been damaged by the Summerton spell to finally see the rot at the core of the town. The pain of losing their brothers was enough to intrude on the cocoon. Everyone else chose to look away, and the coven members themselves — who, like the people of Omelas (and us), know and are making a fully conscious choice — find ways to justify it.

Also reviewed by: Pink Me, Wandering Librarians, and Bookshop

A couple of favorite bits:

The key to dystopia is some element of larger societal commentary. It’s not simply a ruined futuristic world. Some people miss this key point while writing what they believe to be a dystopia. What is your dystopian world trying to say?

(Though I’d say this is maybe more a problem of subgenre semantics. Nothing wrong with a good straightforward post-apocalypse, I say.)

Totalitarian government. ‘Nuff said. You will find the presence of an oppressive, totalitarian government in nearly every dystopia you come across. This naturally makes sense, as a dystopia portrays a society we would fear, and totalitarianism is certainly something most people fear. This makes it a common trope, but not necessarily cliché. It becomes cliché when the government is a one-dimensional bad guy that just likes to torture its people. As with any villain, it should be more nuanced than that – the government leaders should genuinely believe they are doing what’s best for their people. They may believe it in an incredibly twisted way, but they believe it. There’s also the option of going against the grain and creating a dystopia based on something other than an evil, overreaching government. There are other social avenues to explore.

I would love to see a novel about a hippie-run dystopia. (Although I guess that’s every story about failed communes?)

In many ways, this is fairly standard dystopian fiction: the closed society, the despotic leader, the mind control. There’s some typical preachy Big Brother talk (“religion is the opiate” etc., “difference sows discord,” yadda). It is a quite successful example of the genre; I felt trapped in the claustrophobia of the ship under Eldest’s restrictions, and by being kept as in the dark as the characters are. Of course there has to be a romance, but it takes an appropriate back seat.

As in the best dystopias, there are some big revelations that make the original Eldest’s seizure of power seem possibly sensible. Unfortunately, the resolution of these issues is way too easy. It’s a YA SF convention to have the teenagers resolve not just their personal problems but the world’s problems. Sometimes that’s plausible, but in this case… I have my doubts. The reason we don’t actually put teenagers in charge of everything is that they don’t have the experience to think through all the implications, or to temper idealism with a touch of healthy misanthropy. Overall, though, this is pretty solid science fiction.

It is also one of the most crushing tragedies I’ve read in a long time, to the point where I’m not really able to be objective about the rest of it. Amy left her entire life behind, the adult she would grow up to be on Earth, so that she could be with her parents as they fulfilled their lifelong dream of starting a new colony. But she’s awakened 50 years too soon; by the time she sees them again (not to mention land and sky), she’ll be an old woman.

How do you reframe your life after a devastating loss? How do you get to a place where your life has meaning and joy again? How do you come to believe that what will happen next is worth waiting to see? This book is very much about waiting, and different characters have very different responses to it — Amy, Elder, Eldest, the still-frozen colonists, the whole ship. A lot of time has to pass between now and the goal that means the world to you (in this case literally); how do you cross that bridge of time?

(I’ve been thinking about all of these questions a lot lately because of some stuff going on in my own life, so when I finished the book a few weeks ago it was either the perfect time or the wrong time. Either way, it completely wrecked me.)

Also reviewed by: Phoebe North, The Book Smugglers, and Steph Su Reads

No point in reading this review if you haven’t read the first book and are planning to, so SPOILERS AHEAD for both books!

I wanted to love this. I really did. And there were many things I did love — it’s tense and thrilling in many places, and I was happy to see more of both Incarceron and the Realm (especially the peasants’ lives). But I am a world-building nut, and the plot holes were bigger than the hole in the Warden’s floor after the Realm’s illusions disappear.

So let’s talk about that: how did the illusions work, anyway? They must have been matter, or people couldn’t have stepped on the stairs or been warm under the clothes. So why did everything crumble as soon as Incarceron sucked up all the power, causing the illusions to fail? I could see everything getting faded and crappier, but it would have had to be there and functional, right? Unless the illusions stopped time somehow? The book never said that, and I’m not sure how it would work anyway.

And then there’s the power issue. There’s limited power left and Incarceron used it all to create its body, such that the Prison’s systems fall apart and the Realm’s illusions disappear. So how can everyone come and go from the Prison willy-nilly at the end? Wasn’t that supposed to take more power than was left?

I’d probably still read a final book in the trilogy, if there were to be one, because I was so drawn in by the end of Sapphique — looking out over the huts of the peasants who’ve known how to live without energy and luxury for years, getting ready to build a new world with them. I said I was a world-building nut, and I mean this kind of world-building, too: I love stories of people and countries starting over. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for fewer inconsistencies to this new world.

Also reviewed by: The Book Smugglers, Steph Su Reads, and Presenting Lenore

It’s a little frustrating, because “Why are dystopias so popular?” is a very different question from “Why are books with dark themes popular?” Paolo Bacigalupi (author of my beloved Ship Breaker) answers the former question, while Maggie Stiefvater (author of the paranormal romance Shiver trilogy) answers the latter. Unsurprisingly they come to very different conclusions.

Also unsurprisingly I’m more interested in Paolo’s answer — both because I heart dystopias, and also because he answers for my pre-adolescent self: “I suspect that young adults crave stories of broken futures because they themselves are uneasily aware that their world is falling apart.” Of course, a lot of what made me aware that my world was falling apart was dystopian/post-apocalyptic literature, so it’s a cycle. Who’s to say we’re right, we doomsaying consumers of dystopiana? Maybe the world will be saved by shiny technology, the way science fiction claimed in the 50s! (Um.)

I certainly can’t speak for all kids who read these books; almost certainly the “why” is different for everyone. (A theory I have about post-apoc which none of these writers quite mention (Scott Westerfeld comes closest) is that post-apocalyptic societies are so broken and anarchic that they give young people a chance to rise as heroes, to determine their own destinies.) But I know why I read them, and why I still do, and it leans a lot more towards truth-telling than escapism.

(There are seven articles here from YA authors and academics, and they’re all worth reading. Thanks Wandering Librarians for the link!)

Before Kellen was born, the world was on the brink of nuclear war, followed by a terrible plague that wiped out most of the planet’s men but stopped the war. His father, a teenage boy at the time, survived, along with a handful of others in isolated pockets. Now Kellen is a teenager himself, a rare boy in a world of women. The world is better this way, he’s taught: no war, no fear. Men live under strict control in cities, or as loners in rural areas. The female:male ratio is kept very high by women like Kellen’s mom, who has an important job with the Population Apportionment Council. When Kellen overhears some secret PAC business about a plague outbreak in his dad’s loner community, he and his new friends Sunday and Tia take off to warn his dad… and discover that Everything They Thought They Knew Was a Lie.

Whew, that was a lot of explaining! There’s a lot of explaining in this book, too. Within the first couple of chapters, the protagonists go to school, wherein they have a convenient lesson in plague history — followed by some convenient homework in pre-plague history. I have a higher tolerance than many SF readers for “apocalypse how?” but this was too ‘splainy even for me.

And in part because everything got explained so thoroughly, the Big Secrets were too obvious, too soon. You might have figured out the first one just from my first sentence (which is no more spoilery than the first couple of chapters themselves), or from the movie-style tagline on the cover, “What price would you pay for a perfect world?”

Fortunately for my perception of the characters’ intelligence, that secret doesn’t drag out for the whole book. And once Kellen, Tia, and Sunday head out of town, the action moves pretty fast. This is an exciting page-turner, for sure, and it does raise some interesting (if unsubtle) questions about what a world run by women would be like. Unfortunately, it also gives too many easy answers.

I think it will appeal to kids who want a fun adventure book, but for older folks who actually want to consider the difficult gender questions, read Y: The Last Man instead.

Also reviewed by: The Book Smugglers, Steph Su Reads, and Jen Robinson.

If you read dystopian sci-fi, you probably had a handle on the tropes of this one from my first sentence. With the exception of Trella’s nifty use of the air and heat pipes to sneak all over Inside (Inside Out videogame, anyone?), there isn’t much that’s new here. Which means I get to use it as an opportunity to talk about the tropes in general! Whee! (Mild spoilers below)

I had a hard time getting into Trella’s story, because the world was too full of boredom and she was too cynical about it. Here’s the thing: if you make a world crappy enough and the hero miserable enough, it’s a drag to read about.

In fact, I didn’t even get why the characters were motivated to survive, let alone work their assigned shifts. These scrubs work 10 hours on, 10 off for food and sleep, forever and ever, no holidays or mindless television entertainment or anything. They get bread, but Snyder left out the circuses. Their kids are taken away to be raised in Care Centers, so they don’t have the motivation or hope for the future that comes from responsibility for the next generation. Any close enough relationship is broken up by the Pop Cops. They have no strong religion, so most aren’t motivated by an afterlife. What’s left? I’m bumming myself out again just writing about it!

I found a lot of gaps in world creation — technologically, historically… I don’t want to get into all of them, but for example: there are magical eye drops that change blue eyes brown (to hide in the lower levels; only Uppers have blue eyes) and then turn them back again, but only if you genetically had blue eyes to start with! The Parenthetical.net Scientist-in-Residence (Boyfriend S) confirms that this makes no biological sense. Snyder’s previous books all appear to be fantasy, which makes sense — the world creation doesn’t have to be as technologically tight.

(Also, only Uppers have blue eyes. Because of all the genetic mixing in the lower levels, whereas the Uppers have pure family lines. Blue eyes become a plot point. Destiny, eye color essentialism, blah blah, over it.)

The ending was far, far too easy. The cute in-jokes between the romantic leads felt forced. The villains were Pure Evil. Meh, meh, meh, I say.

Also reviewed at: Presenting Lenore (who loooved it, so YMMV), and One Librarian’s Book Reviews.

Claudia is the daughter of the Warden of Incarceron. As the only person who can enter the prison, he’s one of the most powerful men in their world, and a key player in the Victorian-style intrigue that swirls around him. Claudia and her tutor Jared are intrigue experts in their own right, and rebellion brews when they find a device that allows them to communicate with Finn.

I was absolutely sucked in to this dark, bleak world. Claudia, in particular, is a great character: scheming, practical, and with enough cold intelligence to match her father. She’s not the typical wide-eyed YA heroine thrown into adventure unprepared.

Incarceron is a textbook dystopia (without being particularly post-apocalyptic): everyone outside still thinks that Incarceron is the paradise it was intended to be. And Claudia’s world demands that everyone live “in Era,” following a strict Victorian code to prevent the destructive influence of technological advancement… but of course this comes with death from curable diseases and a backstabbing monarchy.

Though if everyone really believes that Incarceron is a paradise, why aren’t more people trying to get inside? And living “in Era” is a cool idea, but why is it so sketchily applied? Sometimes it’s taken seriously (Jared’s lack of medicine for his illness), but sometimes it’s just a facade (all the fancy technology in the Warden’s house).

In short, there are some enormous plot holes, but it doesn’t matter — the atmosphere is deliciously creepy, the story is original, and I can’t wait for the sequel.

(Can we talk about the cover, though? Please stop with the holographic covers. The shiny shiny rainbows just make everything look chintzy. If it weren’t for Paula at Pink Me, I wouldn’t have picked this up because the cover made it look like an Alex Rider book or some other bit of generic adventure fluff.)

Also reviewed at: Pink Me, The Book Smugglers, and Presenting Lenore

When Ron visits Manhattan with his dad near the end of the summer, he can’t get enough. (The girls, after all, are “fantastic.”) He runs away from home for a last weekend fling before they close the City. Like a good suburban tourist, he picks up a hot chick who steals his money and gets beat up by a guy who steals his ID. Without an ID he can’t leave the Dome before it closes for the year. He’s trapped.

New York, of course, was not completely evacuated. It’s full of an assortment of gangs, one of which picks Ron up because he happens to be good with machines. From that point on it might as well be any urban gang story, with the violence and girls-as-currency and internal power struggles and tragedy. (Until the end, which I’ll get to in a minute. It’ll be spoilery, because the end is the most interesting part, but the book isn’t so amazing that I think it matters if you’re spoiled.)

Apocalypse how? This isn’t a worldwide apocalypse, but a local one (and very much a dystopia).

Here’s the World-Weary Adult Who Explains It All (every YA post-apoc has one):

“Too many people crowded too close together. People started falling over in the streets, dead from pollution or mugging or just plain brain fever…. The banks threw up their hands and said the city was a bad investment. Eight million bad investments. Then the Federal Health people came in and said the environment inside the Dome had sunk below the level needed to sustain human life. Inside of a year everybody would be dead.
“You should have seen the rush! It was like a riot and an earthquake and a war, all at once. Went on for months. Families separated. Kids left behind…. People running every which way. When the dust finally cleared, the City was declared officially abandoned — empty, nobody here. So they sealed it off.”

Some people stayed behind, of course. Including the World-Weary Adult, some black marketeers who make their money off starving kids and then go home to the Tracts at night, the gang kids’ parents, and, as it turns out, all the people of color.

A lot of talking about race:

From the very beginning you know that the only black people Ron has ever seen are on TV, fighting the distant war in South America. When he joins the gang, it’s made clear that the south of the City is all white gangs, while the north is run by their enemies, the black “Muslims,” who are united under one leader, Timmy Jim.

After the devastating destruction of his own gang, Ron is taken to work for the Muslims, fixing their machines and training more repairmen. (It turns out, by the way, that “black” here includes Latin American and “Indian,” which probably means Native American rather than South Asian. Asian Americans are never explicitly placed in the world of this book.) Timmy Jim adds this to the apocalypse story:

“Oh, they took out the whites, all right [when the city evacuated]. Rich and poor. Irish and Italian and WASP and all. They got out okay. But they kept us inside. When we tried to get out, they beat us back with clubs, electric prods, water cannons, lasers — they didn’t let us out, man! They closed this City and wrote it off as a dead loss and claimed all of us were dead.
“That was why they closed the City down, man. The real reason! Wrote off all the welfare cases…. Left us to starve, to freeze, to be rat bait. They left us to fight with each other and kill ourselves off.”

But Timmy Jim is more than a gang leader — he’s a military commander, and he has big plans. First he got the black part of town under control (Ron describes it as cleaner, with working lights and open shops). Next the Muslims will fight until they unite all the white gangs under Timmy Jim, too. And then they’ll invade Outside. All those black soldiers? Timmy Jim planted them somehow (the book has some plot holes the size of Manhattan Dome), so he knows they won’t defend the Tracts.

Ron is stunned. He no longer feels particularly connected to his home, after a year in New York, but he can’t imagine it invaded either. (And, I’m sure, can’t imagine it controlled by a black man, though he doesn’t say that explicitly.) At the same time, he’s horrified by the starvation and poverty he’s seen in the City. At the end of the book, he manages to get his ID back. He leaves when the City reopens in June, vowing to “change [the Outside people],” to “rub their noses in the filth they’ve left behind them.”

So on the one hand, the blacks have their shit together way more than the whites — their part of town is the part that works. On the other hand, that’s because they’re run by a military dictatorship. I’m not sure what other sort of government would work for people sealed up in a lawless, starving City, but we’re clearly supposed to be afraid of Timmy Jim and the idea of him invading Outside.

Ron is offered as the saner, safer alternative: the Tract whites can change, without the violent revolution. “Even if I have to make myself President,” he vows — not “even if I have to blow some shit up.” We white folks can fix ourselves from the inside, now that we understand the problem. It’ll all be ok, we just need to be shown the way by one of our own!

13 vs. 31: The starkness of the color line felt very ’70s to me — not that we don’t still have plenty of racism, obviously, but I find it hard to imagine this book flying today. It doesn’t even pay lip service to the idea that people of different races should try to get along.

A lot of the world-building doesn’t hold together. How can New York be so crowded and full of shops and “sharp” girls if everyone who fills it in the summer is from the Tracts just like Ron? He says he feels like a “real” New Yorker when he buys his fancy duds, but there’s no such thing. (Well, of course there is, but he doesn’t know that yet.)

Also, it’s implied that the soldiers don’t mostly come from Cities. So where do the black men who become soldiers grow up? Are there poorer black Tracts? And where did all the poor white City people end up?

I’ve always had a fetish for closed societies, which is I think what appealed to me about this 20 years ago. (Also, who could resist a dramatic title like City of Darkness? Which, now that I think of it, is kind of a terrible pun…) I was more annoyed this time ’round by the things that didn’t make sense. But I was still drawn in (as evidenced by the fact that this is the longest post ever).

Finally, an environmentalist sidebar for Earth Day: Ron and his friends gush a lot about how exciting all the noisy cars and crowded streets of the City are, compared to their own sanitary homes and electric cars or trains. The thrill of the City is in the transgression. When Ron leaves the City to shake things up Outside, it’s the ultimate transgression — maybe he hasn’t grown up, as we’re led to expect from the usual trajectory of the YA novel; maybe he’s just taking his thrill-seeking to the next level.

Covers: The first one was the cover of my childhood (sorry it’s so tiny); you can’t tell it’s science fiction at all. It just looks like urban teen fic (with very ’70s haircuts). The others are obviously SF, but you can’t tell they’re YA. I do kind of dig the one in the middle that looks like a graphic novel.

…Whew! Guess I made up for not posting in a week. Pseudo-academic wankery takes up some space, man. You get a cookie if you made it this far. A post-apocalyptic doom cookie.