Friday, March 29, 2013

The Declaration

Gemma Malley

Apparently (and there is not a bit of surprise in my tone here), young adult fiction is all about reproduction. Odds are that a dystopian future is going to be based on how reproductive rights are withheld, suppressed, or just plain bad. Ally Condie's Matched and Lauren Oliver's Delirium trilogies are great examples of this, and now with the Declaration, we get another version. In Malley's version, big-pharma has finally developed the "live forever" pill and society has accepted it as a natural good. What society then comes to realize is that if you actually live forever, you don't need kids and in fact, they become a burden to the global resource problem. So anyone who does not opt out of eternal life must sign the declaration, stating that that will not have kids. Of course there is an underground and of course, the protagonist is one of these kids that is born, considered "surplus" and sent away to an orphanage of sorts to be trained in the arts of service (because if they are surplus, they may as well be maids or gardeners, right?). Surplus Anna meets a new kid in the orphanage, begins to have her eyes opened and struggles to understand the world in a whole new way.

Probably the most interesting idea here is to really think about societal willingness to enforce limits on families as people do actually begin to live longer. Do these limits mean pressure to limit births, or reconsidering the value of living longer. "Who is really the burden?", asks Malley. Is it the aging parent who continues to consume resources, or the kid who is consuming additional resources? So while this is a second tier dystopian future novel, I continue to like the themes that the authors are raising as they look into our not-so-distant future and take a stab at the kinds of societal issues that we will necessarily be addressing.

Wait

Monday, March 18, 2013

The City & The City

China Mieville

This was a strange book. I feel like I have been saying that a lot lately about the books I am reading (see here), but mostly this has been good. It took the first third to really understand what was going on, and it turns out that Meiville has taken a current political issue and pushed it to the extreme. So extreme, that it is ridiculous, and yet allows you to pull back and look at current reality with a new lens. The landscape of this novel is two cities (Beszel and Ul Qoma) that are split a la Berlin pre-1989 or Jerusalem now. The difference is that the cities are not split by a single wall or line, but geographically overlap. So there are sections that are total Beszel, sections that are total Ul Qoma, and sections that are "crosshatched", or geographically coincident. Think gerrymandering on steroids. The citizens of each city are not allowed to cross the borders, which means careful attention everywhere. And when in these "crosshatched" areas, you may be standing next to someone from the other city, but not allowed to talk to them as that would constitute a border crossing. A mysterious police force called Breach monitors and enforces border violations with a zero tolerance policy. With this landscape developed, throw in a murder mystery that does cross borders, detectives on both sides that are serious about solving crime and you have an entralling tale. I love how Meiville has developed the "unseeing" as a natural way of life in the crosshatched areas and challenges our detective protagonist to see and unsee differently when he travels to the other city. One could definitely ponder for quite some time what kinds of things in our own lives we choose to unsee, or have happened into unseeing based on repetition or denial.

Read

postscript - It has been just about a year since my librarian has been feeding me books and now 50 books later, I have yet to be disappointed. If you want to read more or start reading, get to know your librarian. In my case, if you tell her the kinds of things you like... she will hook you up.