These last few weeks have been murder at work, but for some reason, the more I work and the more I have to do, the more likely I am to escape as much as possible into some good books. I haven't been avoiding work too much, but I have managed to squeeze in a lot of books at lunch, breaks, and bedtime in the last couple of weeks:
Uglies, Pretties, Specials, and Extras, by Scott Westerfeld
I'd heard a lot about these books on Boing Boing and Scott Westerfeld is one of the people who wrote positive blurbs about Little Brother
by Cory Doctorow. They are a series of teen/young adult novels and I'd picked them up and put them back down several times because they looked interesting, but seemed clearly aimed at the teen girl markets. From the back cover and description, they are about, apparently, a near future extrapolation of society where everyone gets a free and perfect plastic surgey makeover when they turn sixteen that makes everyone perfectly beautiful, eliminating any social distinctions based on looks. The main character, Tally, is fifteen and still "Ugly" - a normal looking teenager looking forward to her birthday when she can become a "Pretty", but who gets trapped into chasing after her friend, Shay, who doesn't want to become a Pretty and chooses to run away to avoid the surgery. The books have big pictures of teenage girls on the front and the jacket descriptions make them seem like they are going to be about high school cliques and boyfriends in a society much like ours where plastic surgery is normal and expected of everyone.
I broke down and bought Uglies, the first book in the series, and put off starting it for a few days. In fact, I bought it to foist it off on Morgan to see what she thought of it. After I finished World War Z, I picked it up and though I'd read a few chapters. The book jacket is misleading. Evidently, the publishers thought that teen girls were their best-bet target demographic and didn't want to scare them off reading a hardcore SF novel. Everything that I just said above is true, but the series is actually set several centuries in the future (at least four hundred years) and is full of hoverboards, nano-technology, bio-engineering, and cyberpunk-style rebellion. A bioengineered plague that infests and destabalizes petroleum products (making them combust on exposure to oxygen and spreading the spores in the resulting smoke) destroyed all of society and decimated humanity. Now everyone lives in isolated, "perfect" cities where all of their wants and needs are provided and their lives are carefully planned and engineered and the high technology lets them live in total harmony with their environment (it's a tree-huggers wet dream - the people react to the thought of cutting down a tree as if it were murder and they're taught that the "Rusties" - basically us - were murderous, violent, insane people who destroyed the world and almost wiped out humanity. Kids are born and live the first few years of their lives with their "perfect"/middle-Pretty parents, then they are shipped off to dorm-schools (they still see their parents). When they are around puberty, they are considered "Uglies" and live in high-school level dorms where they are educated until they turn sixteen. At sixteen, they have the surgery and become "New Pretties" and live in their own section of the city for several years until they are ready to assume careers, when they have other surgeries to make them "Middle Pretties" and look more mature - then they can marry and have kids. The New Pretties are coddled, have few rules, and live life as a perpetual series of parties, beautiful friends, beautiful clothes, champaign, and entertainment.
I told Renee that the book surprised me, I was expecting The O.C.
meets Gattaca
, but instead it was just like Logan's Run
, but instead of killing you at 30, they turn you into Paris Hilton at 16.
Tally wants nothing more than to become a "Pretty", but her best friend Shay runs away and the shadowy Special Circumstances group tell Telly that she must follow Shay and help them find where the escapees are hiding or they won't turn her Pretty (again, just like Logan's Run where they turn up his life clock and turn him into a Runner). Of course, and it's pretty obvious and not much of a spoiler, it turns about being a "Pretty" involves something a little more sinister than changing your looks.
That's all I'll give away. I've read the first two (Uglies and Pretties) and I've started the third (Specials). I think the first three are a complete trilogy, but there is a fourth book (Extras
) that is just out in hardback - I'm sure I'll get it too at this rate. The books are full of action and really complex moral and ethical dilemmas about individual freedoms vs. the good of society, whether it is right to make choices for people who have been engineered to be unable to make choices on their own, how people change as they mature and whether these changes make them different people, the role of beauty in society (of course - that is what I though the books were all about, but it is only one facet of it), and how much you can muck with biological and the human psyche and still be human. Despite the covers, they really should equally appeal to boys, but also to anyone who likes really good SF novels.
World War Z, by Max Brooks
This book was a wonderful surprise, I'd read some reviews and recommendations by the zombie movie fanatics on Ain't It Cool, but I didn't really think it would be that great of a book and I really didn't believe the format would be that engaging or coherent. The book is written as if it were the creation of an investigative journalist about 5-10 years after a world-wide zombie outbreak. If you've watched any zombie movies, you know the drill. He picks and chooses a bit on his zombie mythos, but basically his zombies work like this: A mutant viral disease breaks out in China that kills infected people and then reanimates their corpses as flesh-eating zombies. It's not the "everyone who dies comes back to life as zombies" like in the George Romero zombie movies, but other than that, it could be Night of the Living Dead
or Dawn of the Dead
or even Shaun of the Dead
- the zombies are completely unintelligent, slow and shambling (no fast zombies like 28 Days Later (Widescreen Edition)
or Half-Life 2
), don't bleed, their body parts continue to move even when hacked off, they have no memories or emotions, and the only way to kill them is to burn them or destroy their brains. The virus is spread by bites or even scratches - anything that brings zombie fluids in contact with the human bloodstream. Incubation rates in normal humans is variable, so some infected people manage to travel by air or car to other parts of the world before the virus kicks in an zombie-fies them. The infection rate is 100% - no one is immune, so the zombie plague spreads like the ultimate disease vector simulation. They don't need air, so they even walk or drag themselves underwater, and millions wander around the bottom of the ocean or in lakes, attacking people in the water or dragging themselves on shore in distant areas that have isolated themselves by air and boat travel and kicking off new outbreaks. Their bodies freeze solid in winter, but thaw out in the spring. They don't decay, but eventually they wear out enough to "die" or become ineffectual, but there is no "cure", so new outbreaks and fresh zombies can arise. The initial military response is ineffective, since we've all developed our military to modern needs - air superiority, bombs, tanks, missiles, and the like - all of which are pretty much useless. Drop a cluster bomb into a group of zombies and you kill a certain number, but you spread a bunch of crippled zombie parts and a zombie torso laying in the grass or rubble is more dangerous than one up and walking around - at least you can seem them. Tanks and planes are useless. Nukes might wipe out concentrations in cities, but the world would be a radioactive wasteland of zombies if they were used to their full potential (although a few nukes do get fired). They have no emotions, so they can't be demoralized or scared away - in fact they call each other with their moans, so any armed conflict becomes a fight to the total destruction of one side or another with the zombie ranks increasing if they manage to infect soldiers or other human combatants.
So, back to the structure of the book. The journalist has travelled around the world interviewing survivors of World War Z. The book is a set of the transcripts from these interviews, set in chronological order, but scattered around the globe. Some of the transcripts are very short, others are mini-short stories, but, with only a handful of exceptions, once you hear the story of one person in one country, they never appear again in the book (although other stories might reference the events of their stories or intersect with them). It doesn't seem possible that a coherent storyline could emerge from this, much less a story that keeps you turning the pages. Everyone interviewed survived and you know that humanity eventually "won" the war, but you don't know how until all of the story unfolds. Even more interesting, different types of people and governments approached it differently, so there is a very interesting and realistic analysis of society, psychology, history, and politics involved. In short, it was amazing and thought-provoking. He did a massive amount of research into different governments and societies, different military hierachies and weapons, and, except for the science of the zombies, he gets the rest of his science and science fiction right (one of the survivors was the commander of the ISS - they had a six man crew at the beginning of the outbreak, three escape in the Soyuz escape pod, the other three remain in orbit and rig together some long range EVA vehicles out of satellite tenders to steal supplies from a new Chinese space station and wind up spending a few years in orbit before being rescued by Spaceship Three after the war, but cosmic rays have given them cancer and their bones and muscles have degenerated so much they are are bedridden and sick for the rest of the time they survive on Earth - he even gets his space science and physics mostly right).
BTW, the author, Max Brooks, is Mel Brooks' son! He wrote the The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead
book before this - one of those fake handbooks, where he outlined all of the details of his flavor of zombies. In World War Z, the survival guide is a real publication printed by the U.S. Government. He doesn't dwell on the scientific and biological details on how the zombies "work" (which is good, because there are several things about them that are impossible in all probability), but they are not supernatural and, despite what a few groups of people think (and he does interview them and their detractors as well), they aren't based on some outer-space plague, or biological warfare agent, or "When there is no more room in Hell, the dead shall walk the Earth" ala George Romero. Needless to say, it does have a great deal of gore and violence and some of the scenes are tense, and horror-movie like, but it didn't really seem like a "horror" novel to me - more of a military/poltical/psychological SF satire - completely serious, but obviously winking at the reader about everything from global politics to every zombie horror movie ever made.
Chasing Darkness, by Robert Crais
This is the latest in the Elvis Cole mystery/detective series by Robert Crais. If you ever read detective/mystery novels, or just like good books, you should check out this series (and Crais' other books, as well). When I was in LA, I purposefully set out out to visit some of the places that Elvis Cole frequents and where he lives, so this was another book where I could visualize the settings vividly - Mulholland Drive, Laurel Canyon, and Hollywood and the Valley). Too short, but another great book in the series.
Fearless Fourteen, by Janet Evanovich
I've recommended these books before, but I continue to enjoy them. These are heavy chick-lit comedy/mystery/detective novels about Stephanie Plum, an inept New Jersey girl who works as a bounty hunter for her cousin's bail bond agency. This is obviously the fourteenth book in the series and is totally laugh out loud funny. Yes, it is chick-litish (and Evanovich also writes, or has written, straight-forward bodice ripping romance novels), but don't let that scare you. Stephanie's romantic problems (she's torn between Morelli, a police detective she grew up with, and Ranger, the superbad head of a private security/mercenary organization) are are funny as the crime stories she gets mixed up in with her sidekick Lula (a four hundred pound black ex-hooker) and her family (particularly grandma Mazur, who is around 80, goes to funerals for fun, and is way beyond caring what anyone thinks about her or who she offends and has decided to live as much as she can before she dies - in this book, she gets addicted to a World of Warcraft style MMPORG and runs around talking about PvP kills, "griefer" players, and making pacts with the King of the Wood Elves).
OK, break is over - back to work....
