I am totally copying Atomic Nerds here and succumbing to one of those chain blog trend things. So feel free to skip. But I can hardly call myself a Science Fiction enthusiast and not comment on NPR's list of of top sci-fi and fantasy reads, the one's I've read, anyway. The ones I haven't I just removed from the list.
1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Here's something embarrassing: I read this purely because the kid I had a crush on in 7th grade was reading it. But more than that, my best friend at the time and I both had a crush on him, and we were both racing to see who could read it first and make it the most obvious to him that we happened to be reading the same thing that he was reading ooh look how much we clearly had in common. It was pretty ridiculous, but had the happy result of exposing me to a genre and series of books that I really liked it at the time. (I wasn't really all that new to fantasy, but Tolkien is one of those "gateway" books in the genre.) I didn't like it quite as much when I went back for a re-read (something I do with ALL the books I really, really love), mostly because there are essentially no female characters at all, and because, you know, it is a long and drawn-out epic.
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
Always a classic. I recently actually made it through the series, all the way to So Long and Thanks for All The Fish after stalling out halfway through in high school. As far as plot goes--there's really not much, so don't expect one--as far as wit and classic British Humor goes, it's great fun.
3. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
I actually haven't read this, but apparently should be shot for admitting that, so suffice to say it's on my list so I can rant about it or rave about it soon.
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
I liked the first one all right, but I got so tired of Look How Glorious Is My Protagonist And How Am I Frank Herbert For Writing Mystical Nonsense That Sounds Oh So Smart that I did, in fact, no joke, throw Children of Dune across the room in disgust. And that's the last I had anything to do with that.
6. 1984, by George Orwell
High school reading requirement. A diverting read, worth having done once, but pretty much way more pessimistic about human nature that I'm willing to accept, which is true about pretty much everything I was forced to read in high school.
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
I didnt' finish this. I didn't dislike it, I just didn't get sufficiently interested in it. I liked the imagery and mythology a lot, and the main character was an interesting and compelling guy, but I just didn't feel like we was going anywhere.
12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
I admit to being a fan, as a result of a different 8th grade crush--although by that point it's because he recommended it to me as one fantasy lover to another. A decade later, and it seems like we might be seeing the last 1000 page installment coming out soon. This really is the Series That Goes On and On and On, and plays the Isn't It So True That Women And Men Are Just Different From Each Other theme really hard, which is a theme I really don't agree with. But he does it in a way that works with the story and isn't meant to be degrading of either women or men in the slightest, and his world and his physics and the intricacies of the plot are oh so cool that what they heck I just think it's great.
14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
I read this and even used to own it, but I couldn't tell you a thing about what happened in it and what is was about. Some kind of heist or something, maybe. Whatever it was, I clearly did not find it very memorable.
16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
I did my 10th grade literary paper on this, and I went through a serious Asimov faze. In general I prefer character driven stories while these more situational, set up to hypothetical ethical questions about the future. Yet they are intellectually engaging, and I like Asmov's optimism. If you're up for some short stories they are good and thought-provoking entertainment for short sitings.
22. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
I really hate books that take the "Lady or the Tiger" approach and don't explicitly tell you how they end. As a literary artifact, I think that tactic more of a cheap ploy than an actual show of literary skill. Also, back in my radical feminist days I wanted to write a book like this without knowing one already existed--and I'm glad I'm a lot wiser now than I was then about human nature. Don't read this if you don't like being depressed.
27. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
I just read bits and pieces of this when I was really young and don't remember much except that I liked it. It's probably worth picking up again as an adult.
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
Early in high school I went through a phase with this where I joined some Internet groups that did some fanfiction-esque writing and art following the rules of Anne McCaffrey's Pern. I stumbled upon that before I had actually read the books, and before I realized she really didn't want her fans to be doing what we were doing because of copyright concerns. The books themselves are pretty good if you your like science fiction and fantasy elements heavily influenced with the plot structures of romance novels--which I did, in high school--although I stopped after about the first four books, because they were getting somewhat similar. Also a little too heavy with the Female Protagonist Is So Much Smarter and Braver And Stronger Than Other Women and thus Rocks while all other women are Stupid Shallow Flakes meme. In high school, of course, I was into that, and wanted to be That Woman--but then I grew up and realized that people are, thank goodness, so much more complex than that.
38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys
This is one of my favorite books, and one of the best science fiction books I have read. It has complex and interesting characters doing intellectually interesting and morally relevant things that matter to them in ways that make you really care about what happens to them. To bad it's also a very sad book.
40. The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
These were too weird and too masculine for me. Steriotypical I Am So Awesome and Manly Protagonist (And I'm Not Particularly Nice Either But You're Supposed to Like Me Anyway), engaged in Battles for Royal Throne Succession in a setting that can really only be described as one continous acid trip. Intrigues among siblings that don't make sense and change on a dime, and women who prety much exist to be ornaments. No thanks.
42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
When I read this I was probably way too young to read a book that had this much sex in it. Which of course meant I devoured it with no small measure of "people do THAT?" and was all kind of confused as to how this mideval sexuality was supposed to translate into this sexuality thing in the modern world. That's one of the things that parents would probably rather not know about their kids' fiction.
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
I tried, I really tried. But I didn't get very far.
47. The Once And Future King, by T.H. White
Same.
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
This is the one by him that I did read all the way through. It was 'aight, although I don't know what's really remarkable about it.
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
I really liked this, for no particular reasons that I can put my fingers on. I thought he had good characterization and managed to pull of intellectual depth and the magical cool mystery of the universe and mathematics all that in way that was REAL, not in the Look At Me Not Making Sense And Trying to Pass It Off Like It's Just Too Deep For You to Understand way that intellectually superior authors like to do. This book is like the perfect antitode to people who really like the univese but hate The Misunderstood Genious meme. Also props for a female protagonist struggling through the politics of being a minority in physical science.
62. The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
Read it and some other pieces of this series, and no. Just not quite deep enough or interested enough or un-cliche enough.
69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
Yeah this was pretty good but this was about the time I was getty really weary of epic fantasy, and it gets pretty epic. I trudged through the long parts (and I did skip some) just because I really, really wanted to know what had happened to Verity.
70. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
Another book that should come with a warning label for containing generous amounts of sex. I liked it a lot up until the ending, which I thought was kind of a cop out, not really a satisfactory ending at all. But I don't really know how you'd end a book like that any other way.
Now, what books weren't mentioned that YOU think should have been on that list?
Showing posts with label good reads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label good reads. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Friday, July 30, 2010
The Word Without Us
A very nice science book, though a little old by now, is The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. It is a complete thought experiment with no bearing on any real situation saving perhaps The Second Coming If You Wanna Believe That (I don't), asking what would happen to the rest of the planet if human beings just dissapeared? Not massively died, leaving our bodies to contribute carbon and nitrogen, not blew each other up, leaving nuclear fallout or just blasted landscapes...just went away. Poof. Of course that's not going to happen (see my above note about second coming), the book is interesting to me anyway becasue of its rich reseach into ecology and evolutionary biology. It does a nice little story about how we got here and to be the way we are, and how our effects have changed things, thus how things might go on changing based on what we know if we weren't here to contribute to it.
There is an important environmental message in this book, which, thankfully, is not "oh humans are so terrible look at how we've destroyed the planet wouldn't it be better off if we just left/went back to our primitive non-technological ways."
The book reminds us that we are nature, we are a species that evolved, lived, and adapted to the predators and prey who existed with us, that developed a successful set of traits for overcoming the evolutionary checks put on us by our predators and our prey, spread out of the land of our birth, and adapted ourselves to occupy pretty much the entire world. In short, a species doing what species do. We possess a damn successful set of traits allowing us to vary our diet and our tolerance of climate to encompass pretty much the whole planet--and the forces of evolution shaped us into what we are just as much as it shaped all the other species that exist with us right now. And all the environmental destruction, all of the simple change we have caused from plastic pellets in the ocean and mass extinction of other mega-fauna to our cities and towns and agricultural systems, are a product of our nature, and we are a product of nature in it's larger form. If it hadn't been us that had outsmarted the predatory checks and perfected our ability to prey on animals and learned how to manipulate the life cycle of plants to our will--maybe it would have been a different species, using whatever adaptations it had to succeed in spite of competition, and succeed on whatever terms those adaptations let it succeed. Humans are NOT the only species who, when unchecked, create environmental destruction. Since nature is very much full of inter-species competition, what we have done is not evil and callous and just as on so terrible violation of the natural world. It's not against nature at all!
In fact, what we have done has allowed us to occupy a unique position on this planet: able to recognize and contemplate our effects on other species. Recognize that we both compete directly with other species for space and right to live, but also depend on what other species to do make our lives have quality. With our needs met (this is arguable when considering all 9 billion of us), we can contemplate the needs of others, and how those needs correspond with our own, and even, sometimes, how they don't but that us living still affects them. We can make the choice to preserve endangered species that benefit us, or, more powerfully, to preserve the ones that don't really do a damn thing for us but we still have this idea that it is the right thing to do. Ideas about right and wrong come from our history as a social species, but that doesn't mean that the meaning of right and wrong do not exist just because they are of our own construction. We are in a way overcoming our nature, transcending it, to extend compassion for the sake of it to places where nature did not expressly place it to begin with. We had to follow nature to get here. But now that we are here, we have the ability to do something about it.
To me, that's environmentalism. First, protecting the things that protect you, like air, waterways, and topsoil, like species that are useful because of biological adaptations that we don't have but benefit from: latex trees, rumen stomachs, working forests that take dirt out of air and water through natural filtration and protect against soil erosion besides. But also, philosophically, because we have transformed our world to suit our needs and so now have the ability to afford to be ethical: because we recognize that our actions have consequences for others, others being not necessarily members of the human species. Caring enough to maybe try to redefine needs as wants, and try to do a little less harm. We are damn special because we can care about harm, because the nature of surviving usually doesn't allow it.
And that's bleeding-heart liberalism if anything ever was.
There is an important environmental message in this book, which, thankfully, is not "oh humans are so terrible look at how we've destroyed the planet wouldn't it be better off if we just left/went back to our primitive non-technological ways."
The book reminds us that we are nature, we are a species that evolved, lived, and adapted to the predators and prey who existed with us, that developed a successful set of traits for overcoming the evolutionary checks put on us by our predators and our prey, spread out of the land of our birth, and adapted ourselves to occupy pretty much the entire world. In short, a species doing what species do. We possess a damn successful set of traits allowing us to vary our diet and our tolerance of climate to encompass pretty much the whole planet--and the forces of evolution shaped us into what we are just as much as it shaped all the other species that exist with us right now. And all the environmental destruction, all of the simple change we have caused from plastic pellets in the ocean and mass extinction of other mega-fauna to our cities and towns and agricultural systems, are a product of our nature, and we are a product of nature in it's larger form. If it hadn't been us that had outsmarted the predatory checks and perfected our ability to prey on animals and learned how to manipulate the life cycle of plants to our will--maybe it would have been a different species, using whatever adaptations it had to succeed in spite of competition, and succeed on whatever terms those adaptations let it succeed. Humans are NOT the only species who, when unchecked, create environmental destruction. Since nature is very much full of inter-species competition, what we have done is not evil and callous and just as on so terrible violation of the natural world. It's not against nature at all!
In fact, what we have done has allowed us to occupy a unique position on this planet: able to recognize and contemplate our effects on other species. Recognize that we both compete directly with other species for space and right to live, but also depend on what other species to do make our lives have quality. With our needs met (this is arguable when considering all 9 billion of us), we can contemplate the needs of others, and how those needs correspond with our own, and even, sometimes, how they don't but that us living still affects them. We can make the choice to preserve endangered species that benefit us, or, more powerfully, to preserve the ones that don't really do a damn thing for us but we still have this idea that it is the right thing to do. Ideas about right and wrong come from our history as a social species, but that doesn't mean that the meaning of right and wrong do not exist just because they are of our own construction. We are in a way overcoming our nature, transcending it, to extend compassion for the sake of it to places where nature did not expressly place it to begin with. We had to follow nature to get here. But now that we are here, we have the ability to do something about it.
To me, that's environmentalism. First, protecting the things that protect you, like air, waterways, and topsoil, like species that are useful because of biological adaptations that we don't have but benefit from: latex trees, rumen stomachs, working forests that take dirt out of air and water through natural filtration and protect against soil erosion besides. But also, philosophically, because we have transformed our world to suit our needs and so now have the ability to afford to be ethical: because we recognize that our actions have consequences for others, others being not necessarily members of the human species. Caring enough to maybe try to redefine needs as wants, and try to do a little less harm. We are damn special because we can care about harm, because the nature of surviving usually doesn't allow it.
And that's bleeding-heart liberalism if anything ever was.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Review: The Fresco, by Sheri S. Tepper
I picked up this aliens-make-First-Contact-on-Earth gem by randomly browsing the shelves at the library. I'm not quite finished yet, but I don't want to risk giving away the ending, so I'll write about it anyway.
It's pretty good, I'll be checking out more by this author.
I like it because of its, hmm, irony? Part of it is clearly a place for the author to vent her solutions, were anything possible, to various social problems. The solutions are humorous, and clearly an interesting mix of left and libertarian, unabashedly so, considering the Bad Guys are socially conservative Republicans. Socially conservative Republicans may not be amused--but they may not be all that inclined to read science fiction anyway, I don't know.
Anyway, the interest in the book is in its multi-layered analysis of good and bad especially through the lens of modern political ideas like libertarianism and liberalism. The protagonist; forty-something, Hispanic Benita Alvarez, is approached by the seemingly stereotypical benevolent aliens with a message of goodwill that she has been chosen to deliver to the authorities. They give her money in exchange--and and reason to finally leave her drunk, abusive husband after nineteen years of capitulating and making excuses for him. In typical star trek fashion, it turns out that the aliens have observed one of our deep-space probes (time-line: circa 2000, with a made-up Democrat president struggling to reclaim the party name after The Sex Scandal of his predecessor) and want to extend an invitation for us to join some intergalactic confederation, if we but make some minor changes to better achieve the prime requirement for entry: Neighborliness. Yet rather than interact directly with the leaders, they choose to keep Benita as their envoy, chosen, Benita suspects, because she was a poor, unknown minority woman, with no personal ax to grind, no reason to lie, and every reason to wish that the aliens would correct a lot of the world's social problems.
And correct problems, the aliens begin to do, no matter what we humans have to say about it. The surprise in this book, the reason why I ended up muttering "oh shit, oh my god" at the end of each chapter, is the lengths and creativity the Pistach undergo to make sure humans can be considered Neighborly. Civil liberties? What if it works? How do we decide when it goes too far? (In my opinion, there is one, particularly disturbing part where it DOES go way too far. The author however, has multi-layered things to say about this, just like everything else, and I suspect Going Too Far is the Point.) Turns out Neighborliness should be vitally important to humans, because worlds rejected by the Confederation become fair game for the predator species out there. (SciFi geek alert: I have a theory as to why, if there really were intelligent aliens out there, they probably wouldn't be predatory, but that's for another time.)
I'll give you one, tantalizing example of one of the author's 'solutions': the genderless Pistach are most perplexed by the treatment of women in the middle east. They are perplexed that such treatment exists (the burquas, the sequestering, the stoning of to death women who accidentally allow their veils to slip), and they are perplexed that nations like the United States don't do anything about it. When challenged about what it is they can do to Earth people, the Pistach use their seemingly-limitless technology to make all of the women in Afghanistan hideous and yet un-harmable by physical violence. If the men of Afghanistan are so worried about preserving the modesty of their women, the aliens proclaim, then surely if the women are repulsive then they will have no need to worry. The women can then go to markets and schools without fear of engendering lusty thoughts in the minds of others.
Ms. Tripper is certainly NOT worried about offending people. If you don't think you're easy to offend, then you might enjoy it too.
Added after reading the end: Actually, I was kind of dissapointed. The Oh Shit moments didn't resolve themselves into exploration of the ideas presented. The personal situation of the protagonists ended with some illogical and out-of-left-field twists that I didn't like because they didn't make sense. Not terrible, just, not as good as I'd hoped, or maybe just not my personal taste.
It's pretty good, I'll be checking out more by this author.
I like it because of its, hmm, irony? Part of it is clearly a place for the author to vent her solutions, were anything possible, to various social problems. The solutions are humorous, and clearly an interesting mix of left and libertarian, unabashedly so, considering the Bad Guys are socially conservative Republicans. Socially conservative Republicans may not be amused--but they may not be all that inclined to read science fiction anyway, I don't know.
Anyway, the interest in the book is in its multi-layered analysis of good and bad especially through the lens of modern political ideas like libertarianism and liberalism. The protagonist; forty-something, Hispanic Benita Alvarez, is approached by the seemingly stereotypical benevolent aliens with a message of goodwill that she has been chosen to deliver to the authorities. They give her money in exchange--and and reason to finally leave her drunk, abusive husband after nineteen years of capitulating and making excuses for him. In typical star trek fashion, it turns out that the aliens have observed one of our deep-space probes (time-line: circa 2000, with a made-up Democrat president struggling to reclaim the party name after The Sex Scandal of his predecessor) and want to extend an invitation for us to join some intergalactic confederation, if we but make some minor changes to better achieve the prime requirement for entry: Neighborliness. Yet rather than interact directly with the leaders, they choose to keep Benita as their envoy, chosen, Benita suspects, because she was a poor, unknown minority woman, with no personal ax to grind, no reason to lie, and every reason to wish that the aliens would correct a lot of the world's social problems.
And correct problems, the aliens begin to do, no matter what we humans have to say about it. The surprise in this book, the reason why I ended up muttering "oh shit, oh my god" at the end of each chapter, is the lengths and creativity the Pistach undergo to make sure humans can be considered Neighborly. Civil liberties? What if it works? How do we decide when it goes too far? (In my opinion, there is one, particularly disturbing part where it DOES go way too far. The author however, has multi-layered things to say about this, just like everything else, and I suspect Going Too Far is the Point.) Turns out Neighborliness should be vitally important to humans, because worlds rejected by the Confederation become fair game for the predator species out there. (SciFi geek alert: I have a theory as to why, if there really were intelligent aliens out there, they probably wouldn't be predatory, but that's for another time.)
I'll give you one, tantalizing example of one of the author's 'solutions': the genderless Pistach are most perplexed by the treatment of women in the middle east. They are perplexed that such treatment exists (the burquas, the sequestering, the stoning of to death women who accidentally allow their veils to slip), and they are perplexed that nations like the United States don't do anything about it. When challenged about what it is they can do to Earth people, the Pistach use their seemingly-limitless technology to make all of the women in Afghanistan hideous and yet un-harmable by physical violence. If the men of Afghanistan are so worried about preserving the modesty of their women, the aliens proclaim, then surely if the women are repulsive then they will have no need to worry. The women can then go to markets and schools without fear of engendering lusty thoughts in the minds of others.
Ms. Tripper is certainly NOT worried about offending people. If you don't think you're easy to offend, then you might enjoy it too.
Added after reading the end: Actually, I was kind of dissapointed. The Oh Shit moments didn't resolve themselves into exploration of the ideas presented. The personal situation of the protagonists ended with some illogical and out-of-left-field twists that I didn't like because they didn't make sense. Not terrible, just, not as good as I'd hoped, or maybe just not my personal taste.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Maximum Ride: Adrenaline Reading for Science Kids
In a stroke of true, teenage-throwback escapism, I've been reading the Maximum Ride science fiction series for, yes, young adults, by James Patterson.
One of my all-time favorite SciFi young adult series--all-time favorite series at all, really--is the Animorphs series, which I devoured for several years. Aliens, group dynamics, secret powers, saving the world, hard choices and moral questions...man I loved the whole occasionally-hokey ride. A lot more than any other of the staple YA series of the time: Babysitters Club (most ardently NOT SciFi), which I never even tried to read, and Goosebumps (not really SciFi either), which was okay but didn't ultimately do much for me.
Anyway, the premise of Maximum Ride was extremely Animorph-ish, what with the science and the quest to save the world and the animal-like superhuman powers, so I picked it up as a 23-year-old because I've been pretty upset lately and I thirsted for my Animorph-loving escapist past.
There are so far six books, of which I've read five (the sixth is still checked out), averaging about 1.5 hours per book. I like them, and because cliffhanging suspense is apparently Mr. Patteron's thing, they are hard to put down until I've finished.
They don't have the depth nor the satisfaction of the Animorphs series though, at least not yet.
I am very taken by the characters: six part human, part avian "genetic experiments" (or, kids with wings!) who were broken out of their life in dog-crates by a sympathetic (or was he?) mad scientist who raised them and taught them things like self-defense and having a conscious, must now run from the scientists who created them and along the way discover how they are supposed to save the world. Fourteen-year-old Maximum Ride, "Max" to her friends, is a kick-ass and no-nonsense heroine, yet has sympathetic and captivating vulnerabilities. I love the rawness, the passion, the courage of her point of view. Watching her grow up, make choices, face hardship, defend her flock and navigate teenage emotions is inspiring, especially so if I were still a fourteen-year-old girl myself. Fang (lacking parents, the kids named themselves) is every girl's dream of a strong and silent hero/sidekick, the other kids are quirky and funny, and the premise of six-year-old Angel--possessing both a six-year-old's lack of judgement or impulse control and the scary ability to both read and control minds--is truly interesting. And of course, who doesn't want to read about kids who can fly, and dream of such an amazing ability for herself?
Because of such rich characterization, I had high hopes for the character-driven nature of the story, and while it does have it's character-driven moments, in truth the majority of the plot is a lot of the same: bird kids running away from some evil figure or other, assisted by their kick-ass fighting skills and superhuman powers, with myterious "hey Max remember to save the world" admonishments thrown in from various sources. It is an action series after all. Enough real story, as opposed to kids going from one fight scene to another to another, is there that I keep reading, but in a sense the frustrating sparseness of it is why I keep reading. I want to follow that glimmer of "story" as opposed to "action scene" to see if it gets anywhere. And it does, but not as satisfactorily as I would like.
In a writing class I took once I learned about the difference between "sustained narrative" and "cheating narrative." In sustained narrative, interesting, unexpected, and mysterious events happen, and those keep the reader reading. And eventually, all of those things link together, bring the story forward in a logical yet powerful way, and are explained to sasisfaction. Example: the Harry Potter series. Hidden things are mentioned, and eventually they end up being important. We always come to understand how and why all events are related and important, and for that "everthing fits together" aspect, we the reader feel very satisfied.
In cheating narrative, by contrast, interesting, unexpected and mysterious events also happen, and also keep the reader reading, so he can figure out what the heck that was about. And then those interesting, unexpected and mysterious things are not brought up again, or are not well explained, or turn out to not really fit very well or not really have much function in the rest of the story. The mystery worked as a cliffhanger: you read on because you want to know. But then you never really find out, because the story goes somewhere else instead. The mystery was then like a cheap trick just to keep you going. The reader is not very satisfied.
A good bit of what goes on in the Maximum Ride books feels like cheating narrative. Example: the person who rescues Max and her flock from the science lab, raises them, and then dissappears turns out to have been working for the Evil Scientists all along. He shows up fairly often in the chase, tells them cryptic and contradictory things, sometimes helps them and sometimes hurts them, and you're left really confused. Rest of Paragraph Spoiler Alert!: In a later book he turns out to have been helping them all along but wanting them to pass "tests", to make sure they really are good enough to "save the world." It seems he's a good guy again, but his whole convuluted involvement is explained only in a few "he said he did it for a little of this and little of this and some of this" expository sentences that do little to expose his inner feelings and motivation, and do little justice to the fairly large part he played in the first half of the series. The second half doesn't seem to have much to do with him at all.
The whole "Max you have to save the world" thread feels a little bit that way to me too. There's a lot of hype about how she has to save the world. She even has a Voice in her head telling her cryptic messages to that affect. It seems like a big deal and you wonder what she has to save it from. But it ends up being something different every time. A little fight with some Seriously Evil Mad Scientists. A little anti-global-warming activism. Yet all those cryptic message made it sound like there Was Some Big Conspiracy and Unifying Purpose for which she was created. (The cover blurbs further this notion: "If she lives, the world lives. It's that simple." Yet I don't yet see any evidence of the world's fate being sigunarly tied to hers, even though she takes out some bad people with the help of her friends.) Maybe we'll find out what that is later (the series isn't done after all), but so far it is either cheating narrative or just not-very-well-put-together continued hints, which feels like cheating narrative even if it isn't intended to be.
In general, for a man who pumps out the novels (look at the "upcoming releases" section of his website: five books coming out in a space of two months) I think he gets a little sloppy with his work. Five stories is a lot to keep track of at once. In the first half of the series Max is described as blond, yet in later books she's suddenly brown-headed. For example. The general not-tied-together-as-nicely-as-suspensful-plot-devices-promise might be a symptom of that as well. I don't think it's cheating narrative on purpose, and it isn't always cheating narrative. Just enough to get on my nerves.
My final peeve of the series is a lack of beleivability in the bad guys. First you have the Evil Mad Scientists, who created Max and flock by grafting bird DNA onto test tube babies and/or children given to science for money by poor parents. They treat the kids like science experience, referring to them as "its" even when the kids smart off, refusing to treat them as humans even though they can talk to them, etc. That just isn't beleivable to me. I don't think there's enough people who would treat something that clearly feels pain and emotional hurt very much like a human child, as something not worthy of even the barest of empathy. One or two, maybe, but a whole multinational corporation...he just didn't make that believable for me. Especially becasue what this Itex wants remains a little bit of a mystery until later in the series. (It turns out to be world domination, but the how, the why, etc, is still not very clear.) Then post-Itex you have some other random genetically or robotically enhanced (but by whom?) bad guys whose past and motivations, beyond just being jerks, also aren't all that clear.
In short, Maximum Ride is a fun, witty, wild science-fiction ride, but it leaves me feeling unsure if James Patterson is really trying or really succeeding at going somewhere. If I were a young adult, I'd really like it, and I'd reccomend it to young adults, because of the science, the strong heroine with strong values, the self-reliance think-for-yourself aspects. It's possible that it really will go somewhere, and the seemingly random threads really will be resolved. Judging from what I've seen so far I don't think they'll be resloved particularly masterfully, but even so it'll be an interesting and fun read.
One of my all-time favorite SciFi young adult series--all-time favorite series at all, really--is the Animorphs series, which I devoured for several years. Aliens, group dynamics, secret powers, saving the world, hard choices and moral questions...man I loved the whole occasionally-hokey ride. A lot more than any other of the staple YA series of the time: Babysitters Club (most ardently NOT SciFi), which I never even tried to read, and Goosebumps (not really SciFi either), which was okay but didn't ultimately do much for me.
Anyway, the premise of Maximum Ride was extremely Animorph-ish, what with the science and the quest to save the world and the animal-like superhuman powers, so I picked it up as a 23-year-old because I've been pretty upset lately and I thirsted for my Animorph-loving escapist past.
There are so far six books, of which I've read five (the sixth is still checked out), averaging about 1.5 hours per book. I like them, and because cliffhanging suspense is apparently Mr. Patteron's thing, they are hard to put down until I've finished.
They don't have the depth nor the satisfaction of the Animorphs series though, at least not yet.
I am very taken by the characters: six part human, part avian "genetic experiments" (or, kids with wings!) who were broken out of their life in dog-crates by a sympathetic (or was he?) mad scientist who raised them and taught them things like self-defense and having a conscious, must now run from the scientists who created them and along the way discover how they are supposed to save the world. Fourteen-year-old Maximum Ride, "Max" to her friends, is a kick-ass and no-nonsense heroine, yet has sympathetic and captivating vulnerabilities. I love the rawness, the passion, the courage of her point of view. Watching her grow up, make choices, face hardship, defend her flock and navigate teenage emotions is inspiring, especially so if I were still a fourteen-year-old girl myself. Fang (lacking parents, the kids named themselves) is every girl's dream of a strong and silent hero/sidekick, the other kids are quirky and funny, and the premise of six-year-old Angel--possessing both a six-year-old's lack of judgement or impulse control and the scary ability to both read and control minds--is truly interesting. And of course, who doesn't want to read about kids who can fly, and dream of such an amazing ability for herself?
Because of such rich characterization, I had high hopes for the character-driven nature of the story, and while it does have it's character-driven moments, in truth the majority of the plot is a lot of the same: bird kids running away from some evil figure or other, assisted by their kick-ass fighting skills and superhuman powers, with myterious "hey Max remember to save the world" admonishments thrown in from various sources. It is an action series after all. Enough real story, as opposed to kids going from one fight scene to another to another, is there that I keep reading, but in a sense the frustrating sparseness of it is why I keep reading. I want to follow that glimmer of "story" as opposed to "action scene" to see if it gets anywhere. And it does, but not as satisfactorily as I would like.
In a writing class I took once I learned about the difference between "sustained narrative" and "cheating narrative." In sustained narrative, interesting, unexpected, and mysterious events happen, and those keep the reader reading. And eventually, all of those things link together, bring the story forward in a logical yet powerful way, and are explained to sasisfaction. Example: the Harry Potter series. Hidden things are mentioned, and eventually they end up being important. We always come to understand how and why all events are related and important, and for that "everthing fits together" aspect, we the reader feel very satisfied.
In cheating narrative, by contrast, interesting, unexpected and mysterious events also happen, and also keep the reader reading, so he can figure out what the heck that was about. And then those interesting, unexpected and mysterious things are not brought up again, or are not well explained, or turn out to not really fit very well or not really have much function in the rest of the story. The mystery worked as a cliffhanger: you read on because you want to know. But then you never really find out, because the story goes somewhere else instead. The mystery was then like a cheap trick just to keep you going. The reader is not very satisfied.
A good bit of what goes on in the Maximum Ride books feels like cheating narrative. Example: the person who rescues Max and her flock from the science lab, raises them, and then dissappears turns out to have been working for the Evil Scientists all along. He shows up fairly often in the chase, tells them cryptic and contradictory things, sometimes helps them and sometimes hurts them, and you're left really confused. Rest of Paragraph Spoiler Alert!: In a later book he turns out to have been helping them all along but wanting them to pass "tests", to make sure they really are good enough to "save the world." It seems he's a good guy again, but his whole convuluted involvement is explained only in a few "he said he did it for a little of this and little of this and some of this" expository sentences that do little to expose his inner feelings and motivation, and do little justice to the fairly large part he played in the first half of the series. The second half doesn't seem to have much to do with him at all.
The whole "Max you have to save the world" thread feels a little bit that way to me too. There's a lot of hype about how she has to save the world. She even has a Voice in her head telling her cryptic messages to that affect. It seems like a big deal and you wonder what she has to save it from. But it ends up being something different every time. A little fight with some Seriously Evil Mad Scientists. A little anti-global-warming activism. Yet all those cryptic message made it sound like there Was Some Big Conspiracy and Unifying Purpose for which she was created. (The cover blurbs further this notion: "If she lives, the world lives. It's that simple." Yet I don't yet see any evidence of the world's fate being sigunarly tied to hers, even though she takes out some bad people with the help of her friends.) Maybe we'll find out what that is later (the series isn't done after all), but so far it is either cheating narrative or just not-very-well-put-together continued hints, which feels like cheating narrative even if it isn't intended to be.
In general, for a man who pumps out the novels (look at the "upcoming releases" section of his website: five books coming out in a space of two months) I think he gets a little sloppy with his work. Five stories is a lot to keep track of at once. In the first half of the series Max is described as blond, yet in later books she's suddenly brown-headed. For example. The general not-tied-together-as-nicely-as-suspensful-plot-devices-promise might be a symptom of that as well. I don't think it's cheating narrative on purpose, and it isn't always cheating narrative. Just enough to get on my nerves.
My final peeve of the series is a lack of beleivability in the bad guys. First you have the Evil Mad Scientists, who created Max and flock by grafting bird DNA onto test tube babies and/or children given to science for money by poor parents. They treat the kids like science experience, referring to them as "its" even when the kids smart off, refusing to treat them as humans even though they can talk to them, etc. That just isn't beleivable to me. I don't think there's enough people who would treat something that clearly feels pain and emotional hurt very much like a human child, as something not worthy of even the barest of empathy. One or two, maybe, but a whole multinational corporation...he just didn't make that believable for me. Especially becasue what this Itex wants remains a little bit of a mystery until later in the series. (It turns out to be world domination, but the how, the why, etc, is still not very clear.) Then post-Itex you have some other random genetically or robotically enhanced (but by whom?) bad guys whose past and motivations, beyond just being jerks, also aren't all that clear.
In short, Maximum Ride is a fun, witty, wild science-fiction ride, but it leaves me feeling unsure if James Patterson is really trying or really succeeding at going somewhere. If I were a young adult, I'd really like it, and I'd reccomend it to young adults, because of the science, the strong heroine with strong values, the self-reliance think-for-yourself aspects. It's possible that it really will go somewhere, and the seemingly random threads really will be resolved. Judging from what I've seen so far I don't think they'll be resloved particularly masterfully, but even so it'll be an interesting and fun read.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)