dystopia

“Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That’s what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.”

Dates read: May 29- June 3, 2019

Rating: 5/10

In a way, I wish I’d had my first serious relationship in high school. I had some big crushes then, but didn’t fall in love for the first time until I was in college. It was an often dramatic relationship, and without much experience of dating, I had no idea how to really manage my feelings. Which meant that I usually let important things, like my social life with my friends and school itself, take the hit while I was trying to figure it out. I survived, I learned, but I think having had less at stake while I was floundering around would have been a better case scenario.

There have to be more songs written about love than about anything else. Love of family, love of country, and most of all good old fashioned romance. It’s a powerful force, which is why the leadership of the society in Lauren Oliver’s Delirium has sought to outlaw it, defining it as a disease to be avoided and/or cured. They’ve developed an operation (basically a lobotomy) that divorces people from their emotions, and Lena can’t wait to have it. Her mother had refused the procedure and died by her own hand when Lena and her older sister were young, leaving them alone in the world, to be raised by their aunt and uncle. Lena’s sister has had the procedure, is married, has a child and a normal life…just what Lena wants for herself. She’s always afraid of putting even a toe out of line and drawing negative attention, so even though her wealthy and beautiful best friend Hana rebels in small ways, Lena stays on the straight and narrow. But on the day Lena is to be evaluated to determine her future, she meets Alex, and everything changes.

Alex, it turns out, is an Invalid…he did not have the procedure performed, and though he’s disguised himself so he can “pass” in normal society unsuspected, his true home is the area outside the border fence, called the Wilds. Despite her fear of falling in love and developing the deliria, Lena is drawn to Alex, and as they continue to spend time together she begins to fall for him. She tries to continue towards the normality she’s always craved, but as the date of her operation draws nearer, she’s less and less sure that she wants it after all. And when a secret about her family is revealed, she knows she can’t stay. But how do you escape from a police state?

It often seems that teenage-girl oriented young adult lit has a pattern: a vulnerable heroine, a totalitarian regime in a dystopian future, a love story. And there’s a reason for that…it’s an appealing story structure! I sometimes regret a little that I grew up in a time before the real YA boom, because I would have read and relished so many of these kinds of books. As an adult, though, there starts to be a same-y quality to reading them. One of the ways Oliver sets this one apart is that the person who seems like the “typical” heroine, the high-spirited Hana, is just the best friend. Lena herself is quiet, introverted, fearful. It’s not a personality type that usually gets to play a starring role, and I think that’ll be appreciated by the less-assertive girls who read this and get to see themselves reflected on the page as capable of daring and bravery.

Despite some bright spots, this was still too formulaic for my personal tastes. It’s engaging, though, without being especially intellectually demanding, so it would be great for a reader looking for something like a beach or airplane read, or who simply doesn’t have a lot of extra mental energy for a book and just wants to be entertained. There are sequels, but I wasn’t invested enough in the world Oliver created to feel like I need to pick them up despite the cliffhanger ending. If you’re looking for something immersive or complex, this isn’t for you. Otherwise, keep your expectations reasonable and this could be a pleasant, easy reading experience!

One year ago, I was reading: Go Went Gone

Two years ago, I was reading: Queen of Scots

Three years ago, I was reading: Astonish Me

Four years ago, I was reading: Ghost Wars

Five years ago, I was reading: Americanah

Six years ago, I was reading: Approval Junkie

“And, rejoining the mid-afternoon crowds ambling in the hot spring breeze, she thought about her work colleagues who went back to their own kitchens in their own homes at the end of each day. She wondered if they, too, gave names to all of their meals.”

Dates read: March 27-28, 2016

Rating: 4/10

I get really annoyed by people who smugly insist that they don’t eat GMOs. Literally every food available at the store has been genetically modified. The corn we buy at the supermarket bears precious little resemblance to the corn that European settlers would have seen when they came to the United States for the first time. It’s bigger, sweeter, more robust. How did it get that way? Cross-breeding! Like everything else out there! Which is just a crude form of…wait for it…genetic modification. If no one objects to cross-breeding, which is necessarily a much more blunt form of genetic modification, why object to much more precise changes in the genome? What if we could make tomatoes bigger and more resistant to disease without losing flavor? Who loses?

Where I think the argument gets interesting is when you start to follow the slippery slope down. We’ve already made significant genetic modifications (again, through cross-breeding) to our domestic animals. What if we decided to start tinkering with people? It might start out with someone totally benign, like neutralizing the BRCA genes and sparing thousands of women the agonizing choice between their reproductive organs and almost certain cancer. Eradicating Tay-Sachs, Parkinson’s. But what about other genetically-related syndromes? What about dwarfism? Down Syndrome? Some forms of deafness that are genetically linked? We start staring down an uncomfortably eugenicist barrel.

A future like this is where we find ourselves in Anne Charnock’s A Calculated Life. It’s the future and there are three kinds of people: organics (totally normal people except with genetic altering to prevent most diseases and addictions), bionics (given an implant that dramatically increases mental performance), and simulants (humans “born” as adults with incredibly powerful cognitive capacity, basically robots in human bodies). Simulants, like our main character Jayna, live in communal compounds and are leased to their employers for large sums of money, collecting only a small allowance of their own. Jayna and her friends are a second generation of simulant designed to be more “lifelike” than the first, who had no real personalities. Amid worrying reports that the simulants are starting to act, well, more like people, Jayna finds herself convinced that learning more about non-simulants in their natural environment will help her be better at her job (predictive trend analysis) and starts to reach out beyond the borders of the world she’s always known.

It’s pretty easy to see where the story is going when it starts to go out of its way to bring up Jayna’s interesting, good-hearted organic coworker Dave. Obviously, they’re going to fall for each other and Consequences Will Ensue. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not at all put off by spoilers, because I feel like they shed light on lazy writing (if all your story has is the twist, it doesn’t have anything), so having a good idea of how the plot would turn out wasn’t the problem. The problem is that it didn’t get there in any sort of interesting or exciting way. Jayna and Dave are never more than thin sketches of characters and their world doesn’t have much richness or detail. It feels like a mishmash of 1984 and Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? except without the incisive social insight of either. It’s not egregiously bad, just aggressively mediocre.

Tell me, blog friends…do you care about GMOs?

Book 318: Delirium

Book 36: A Calculated Life

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