Paolo Bacigalupi, SHIP BREAKER and THE DROWNED CITIES

Fans of the extreme physical action—violent, visceral, and wrenching—of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy now have something in common with fans of Philip K. Dick’s philosophical, alt-future ruminations about the nature of humanity. 

It’s a strange mix, but the way Paolo Bacigalupi does it, it feels natural. The child protagonists of Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities leave hooks deep in the willing reader. The world falls apart, and yet the kids are still kids underneath their adaptation to their environment.

The natural environment is only the first of the changes affecting the characters. In the wake of extreme climate change, the political unity and economic base of the United States have vanished. Scavengers and soldiers prey on the dead and the living, respectively. Bacigalupi writes child protagonists entirely native to this post-apocalyptic world. They adapt or die, and many die despite adapting. For the survivors, characteristics we think of as childlike are a luxury that could get them killed.

Bacigalupi also introduces adults also shaped in varied ways by the environment. Some are hard, cruel, and outwardly strong. Others are kind, generous, and outwardly weak. There is a fairly strong valuation of adult behaviors in Bacigalupi’s two books, but nothing so uninteresting as judgement. The cruel, hard adults are neither excused flatly for their circumstances, or blamed flatly for their actions. When doing right gets people killed, how are we to judge those who do wrong to survive? There are distinctions—cruelty for entertainment versus extreme violence for survival—that teenagers and adults will be better able to parse than kids. These books are definitely for those readers.

There’s an interesting structure to these books. Whereas Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy has one protagonist and a fixed set of support characters, Bacigalupi’s Drowned Cities trilogy (only 2/3 published with the title book of the series coming second) has different protagonists in each of the first two books. 

At times, reading the second book, I felt that Nailer, the protagonist of Ship Breaker, would show up in a few pages. In a sense, he is the ideal companion of Malia, the second book’s protagonist. Bacigalupi kept me anticipating his reappearance for most of the book. However, Ship Breaker shares only one character with the sequel, and the discovery was so unexpected, I’ll leave it to readers to discover.

All of these characters—the culled and calloused children, the scarred and scary adults, and the human-animal hybrids Bacigalupi invents—explore some of the same ground where Philip K. Dick left tracks. What counts as human? It’s not easy to answer. Like Dick, Bacigalupi leaves the argument (for now) inconclusive. The answers aren’t simple, and having opened the can of worms, the humans of Philip Dick’s worlds with their un-welf-aware androids and diembodied intelligences, those of Bacigalupi’s with their hybrids and “nasty, brutish, and short” lives imposed by constant war argue it out inconclusively, through words and deeds.

One difference to note: as much as I like Philip K. Dick’s books, Bacigalupi is the more polished writer of dialogue and character. The standards of science fiction writing have changed. Challenged by Dick’s generation and their successors to come up with better ideas and smoother prose, Bacigalupi’s antecedents and peers created stronger and more literary works. For some reason or reasons, the science fiction I’m reading this decade or so features more young people, whereas the sci-fi  I grew up with featured mainly adults.

Rush, rush... And a review of Veronica Roth's DIVERGENT

May flew by, but not without a bit of exciting reading. 

While setting up my company’s booth at the International Reading Association, I peeked next door and saw a postcard for Insurgent, the sequel to a book on my shelf at home.

“The first book in that series is on the top of my reading list at home,” I told an attendant. Some middle-aged guy working for a tiny publisher of books for the special education market had just admitted to reading a book for teenaged girls. Very suspicious.

And it wasn’t exactly true, but I’m glad I lied. When I got home and saw Divergent, the first book in the series, I started in on it very quickly. It was the most exciting teen novel I’d read since finishing Mockingjay, and that was a year and a half ago. (I read the first five Game of Thrones books in the interim, but that won’t compare very well for all the differences, and I reacted differently to Martin’s fantasy, anyway.)

It was so exciting, the next thing I read (aside from manga, stuff for work, or soccer training materials) was Catching Fire, which I just finished a few hours ago.

The bridges between Divergent and the Hunger Games series are urgency, a compelling dystopian setting, clockwork structure, and well-crafted teenage female leads.

The urgency of Divergent is less existential, at first. The problems Beatrice Prior faces are subtler and less immediately lethal than those faced by Katniss Everdeen. Somehow, the wrenching philosophical and emotional issues Beatrice faces rise to the level of urgency of Katniss’. Rereading Catching Fire reminded me not only how well Suzanne Collins wrote action sequences, but also how well she wrote interior monologue. The strands of conflict and significance revealed in the first chapter follow through each to the last, taut and humming. This is the urgency matched by Veronica Roth in Divergent.

Strange laws, a warped society, alien values or ways of expressing them, the transformation of the familiar into the strange—these are some of the elements that go into a believable dystopia. Both worlds—Panem and Veronica Roth’s Chicago—have somewhat simplistic organizations. Panem has twelve, or maybe thirteen (find out for yourself), districts and a Capitol region, spread out across the former United States. Each produces specific commodities or manufactures a class of products, almost as Roman colonies, but simplified. One district manufactures electronics, one mines coal, one produces textiles, and no others duplicate these categories. Two produce food: one terrestrial and one maritime. Readers can accept this unrealistic situation because the rest of the narrative is so immediately realistic, almost tactile. Collins is especially successful at evoking place, both in terms of sensation and in terms of emotion.

Roth’s Chicago is cleverly transformed in physical terms, but still recognizable. The crucial social organization is simplified and easily understood, but simplistic, the Faction as unrealistic as the Districts of Panem. In place of Districts producing distinct products, each Faction in Divergent subscribes to different values and norms of behavior. This, even more than the differences among districts in The Hunger Games trilogy, adds color to the story line.

This is a good point to make a transition from comparing the dystopias to comparing the high degree of organization common to the Hunger Games trilogy and Divergent. I felt that this was what distinguished Roth’s and Collins’ work from other teen fiction. At each stage, significant details are revealed that either set the stage for later, elaborate on a theme from earlier, or both. The heroine (protoheroine?) Beatrice Prior’s early-revealed fascination with the daring members of the Dauntlesss Faction makes more sense as layers of the society, Beatrice’s past, and her family’s past are revealed, adding layer upon layer of significance to events and situations that seem unimportant or ambiguous.

Collins ratchets up the emotional stress with each additional layer, threatening to overwhelm the reader. Roth weaves the strands of significance back and forth a little less intensely, at least within the first book, but in a similar manner.

One of the similarities in appeal between the Hunger Games trilogy and Divergent is in modeling personalities in the books after real-world teen concerns. In the Hunger Games, children are forced into combat in the arena each year. In Divergent, teens choose their faction at the age of 16, and are initiated or cast out depending on their ability to adapt to completely new rules. This is far more subtle a setup than the Hunger Games, and there’s no central villain in the arrangement, but the most notable difference is that the factions behave a lot like social cliques in some ways. Imagine social cliques with their own laws, territories, and lethal induction ceremonies, as well as hangouts, clothing styles, lingo, and forms of entertainment.

Aftertime, by Sophie Littlefield

Aftertime is a blow-to-the-gut, first of a series by veteran mystery writer Sophie Littlefield. The world she creates is a few years or a few months in our future, but vastly changed. Cass, the protagonist, arrives lost and confused, acts in desperation and fury, squeaking through conflicts and narrowly escaping moral danger and worse. Her heart is wracked by guilt; her body is ravaged by injury and disease; her mind is clouded by both. Cass’ way is uncertain, but she is driven to pursue it full tilt.

The physical descriptions are at times evocative and purely physical—the smell of the miracle plant “kaysev” cooking, for instance—while others are emotionally wrenching to read. This is not a book for children, even the fairly big kids. The frank and unsentimental descriptions of sex, of violence, of social decay are woven into the fabric of the book. They carry the plot along. They are much of what Littlefield wants us to see about Cass.

As a result, reading Aftertime did not go quickly for me. I generally prefer somewhat younger YA fare, or speculative fiction, science-fiction, or fantasy with more magic spells and telepathic dragons. Still, I could feel the story building, the protagonist changing, the world coming into clearer, and often painful, focus. And as it did, I felt more drawn to the story, as draining an experience as it was.

The end is cathartic. It has elements in common with the end of an action flick—I half-expected to hear the music from the end of Terminator II: Judgment Day, or see plumes of evaporating dry ice meant to convince me of a fire. The disturbing parts of the story were prelude to the resolution, but it’s a resolution that leaves the way clear to sequels. There is much in Cass’ world left to accomplish—to repair, to redress—and Cass is the woman for the job.

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[note: The author very politely points out that this is not "YA" - I've seen a lot of definitions of Young Adult lit, and this is very mature for kids, but if your young adults are twentysomethings, this is just about right; it's also okay for older people who want to feel like twentysomethings, though we have to watch out for heart stress - this is pretty powerful stuff.]