Chuck Wendig is like the literary hype man of innovative genre fiction. He's all "AWWWWW YISS! YOU WANT SOME DYSTOPIAN CLASS WARFARE? YOU WANT SOME CREEPY ASS BIOLOGICAL WARFARE? YOU WANT A COMPLEX YA HERO WITH ANGST, HUMOR, AND DESPERATE MOTIVATIONS? YOU WANT IT? WELL I GOT IT. AWWWWW YEAH, COME ON AND GIT IT!" And the result is so damn energizing and exciting and goddamn cool as fuck that it ultimately distracts me from the inconsistencies and problems in the narrative.



And y'know what? I'm pr

Chuck Wendig is like the literary hype man of innovative genre fiction. He's all "AWWWWW YISS! YOU WANT SOME DYSTOPIAN CLASS WARFARE? YOU WANT SOME CREEPY ASS BIOLOGICAL WARFARE? YOU WANT A COMPLEX YA HERO WITH ANGST, HUMOR, AND DESPERATE MOTIVATIONS? YOU WANT IT? WELL I GOT IT. AWWWWW YEAH, COME ON AND GIT IT!" And the result is so damn energizing and exciting and goddamn cool as fuck that it ultimately distracts me from the inconsistencies and problems in the narrative.



And y'know what? I'm pretty ok with that. Entertain me, pen monkey, and I will forgive you for all your literary sins.



Because oh baby is this entertaining. It's basically the story of how Boy Katniss, armed with a wicked slingshot and sense of humor instead of a bow and PTSD, plots to take down his homeland's tyrannical, bourgeois overlords, who--in a stroke of allegorical perfection--are literally living over him and his dirt-farming neighbors in massive hovering flotillas. Cael and Co. live in the Heartland, a clearly euphemistic name for the hell hole that the surface of Earth has become. They have one purpose: to cultivate and harvest Hiram's Golden Prolific, a biologically engineered strain of corn that is so pervasive, autonomous, and hyper-intelligent (for a plant), that it has basically taken over the surface of the known world. It serves as fuel, plastic, construction material, pretty much everything except actual food, for the overlords, the "Empyrean." Sucks for the Heartlanders though, because not only do the chemicals used to control the corn leave them covered in tumors and birth defects, but the corn itself can cause a terrifying parasitic disease known as the Blight.



So the bubble of class resentment is ready to burst and our downtrodden young hero is ready to take up arms (slingshot) against his oppressors. A great premise, and I'll fight anyone who says it's been overdone. I gobbled it up and I'm ready for seconds.



Now that I've gotten the effusive praise out of the way, it's time to start nitpicking the issues, in list format. Be warned, slight spoilers follow.



1. The Obligation. Every 17-year-old goes through a public ceremony in which their arranged marriage is... arranged. They then have a year before they're married to get to know each other. As you can imagine, this is a huge fucking problem if, say, you end up Obligated to someone who is not your current girlfriend. Spoiler alert, this is exactly what happens to Cael. What is never explained is a) why the Empyrean arrange marriages between the Heartlanders, b) what criteria they use for arranging the marriages, and c) how, as it's later revealed, at least one couple managed to get out of their Obligations years earlier and marry for love. And while it's frustrating to not have this all explained, it's not quite as frustrating as the fact that the author was so fucking close to explaining it neatly and simply. The book has a prevailing theme of control over biological diversity. The Heartlanders are not allowed to have healthy seeds for planting their own food, so they're dependent on the Empyrean to supply them with crappy stunted vegetables. People who come down with the Blight or other diseases are often taken away to be experimented on or something. So it's a reasonable logical leap that the Obligation exists to a) enforce a steady supply of Heartlanders are born to toil in the fields, and b) ensure genetic diversity to make sure those Heartlanders are as healthy as possible. But that's never said. And so the Obligation falls under the Sorting Hat Doctrine of Dumb YA Plot Devices.



2. The Strong Female Character is almost none of the above. Cael's girlfriend Gwennie is a member of his salvaging crew and exactly the kind of impetuous, witty free spirit every teenage boy would love to be in love with. Except that she's... not? This is one of those times where no matter how much the author tells you something, it remains basically unbelievable because he never actually shows you. The very first scene starts with Cael & Co. on a salvage mission, and for some unexplained reason, Gwennie is the only crew member not in attendance! I guess she needed to get a dress fitted for the Obligation the next day or some shit but WHY? We never, never see Gwennie actually in action as a member of the crew. And for that matter, despite her sharp tongue and teasing ways, she basically serves as the flag in Capture the Flag for the entirety of the book. There's even a scene where she's locked in a room, aware that her friends need her help, and to reinforce the assertion that she's a woman of action and not a wilting violet she violently attacks the door to get out and... fails. That's right. Cael manages to escape when he's locked up, but Gwennie? Nah. I don't like being lied to. And I was told Gwennie was a bad-ass with all evidence basically pointing to the contrary. She doesn't get to do anything except get captured, threatened, and rescued for the whole book.



3. The infectious disease isn't a real threat. The Blight is mentioned as the boogey man of diseases, which will lead to your execution or exile if you're even suspected of being infected. But then Cael & Co. come into contact with a Blighted person, and that person even goes so far as to touch them with his infected body parts, sticks said infected part down Lane's throat (don't worry, it's his hand, not his... yeah), and all of the kids escape infection. So, is it... not actually that contagious? Because suddenly it's not scary at all. Then later on we meet some folks with the Blight who are living fine and dandy lives because they somehow found a secret way of living without. Which is cool and all, but the impact is lost because the real danger of living with the Blight was completely neutered by the earlier scene.



4. They never go back for their precious hover boat. When their boat crashes early in the book, Cael makes a big deal about how they'll have to find someone to tow it back to town within a day or two or the corn will completely encapsulate it. And then... they never do. They don't even worry about it really. They put more effort into fixing up their shitty borrowed replacement boat than fixing the awesome one that crashed. And the whole book I was like "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST GO BACK FOR THE DUMB PIECE OF EQUIPMENT YOU CLAIMED TO CARE SO MUCH ABOUT." I guess what really bothered me here is the inconsistency. Don't set us up for a thing without delivering on it. Don't tell me you have to go back to the island and then make no effort to go back to the island, you know?



Ok, complaints over. All of this is set over a gorgeous allegory--the Heartlanders down in the dirt, the Empyrean floating in the heavens above--and filled with one of the most original and brilliant set pieces I've ever read in YA science fiction: the corn. It moves of its own volition. It's hyper-invasive, to the point that it'll bust right up through concrete if not drowned in pesticides. It's practically carnivorous and covered in sharp leaves that leave fine cuts on your skin if you walk through it. It was so mysterious and creepy that it almost felt like magic. Plus, few things have more creepy contemporary applicability than genetically modified organisms.



Yes, fine, I'll be reading the second one. But I expect Wendig to get his shit together and iron out those dumb inconsistencies. Because this story is far too interesting to torpedo itself due to dumb errors. Plus, in the next one our boys get to visit the flotillas... and that I wanna see.