New Title and a Review
Tuesday’s Metrics: wrote 263 words, now at 1,399 words, six pages. And I got to the line which is for me the fulcrum of the story, or at least of this character. And then changed the title. For the moment, the story I was calling Neoptolemus is now Fail With Honor.
I finished reading Specials, the third book in Scott Westerfield’s Uglies series last night. I liked the books all the way through to the end. They were thoroughly enjoyable to read. The characters were complex, consistent, and three dimensional, except for the ones who were flat as part of the world building, and even they weren’t truly flat. And the world building, oh, yes! Being primarily a fantasy reader, it has been a while since I enjoyed science fiction so much.
I loved what he did with the primary villain, Dr. Cable at the end - that he ‘fixed’ her without changing her nature - that there was part of her that was ‘evil’ from the operation she had undergone, and part of her that was ‘evil’ because she had chosen to be so. I liked the way she demonstrated free will as both a negative and as a positive.
That theme, the double nature of freedom, is a fantastic theme. Throughout the book it is prevalent. I had a bit of difficulty with the fact that the most resounding note of the ending had to do with environmentalist concerns. Not that those are bad things to talk about, and indeed the dystopia Westerfield wrote was based in many ways on the damage ‘the Rusties,’ intended I believe to be modern Western culture and specifically Americans, had done to the physical world. But I fell like in ending with Tally and David setting themselves up as the guardians of nature against freedom of thought downplayed the latter more than I would have liked.
So, in many ways, if (as is typical for dystopia) Westerfield’s aim was to leave his readers unsettled at the end of the work, he did a marvelous job. He simply didn’t do it in the ways I was familiar with in Ayn Rand’s Anthem or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. He neither made me cheer for a hero who overcame futuristic evils nor overwhelmed me with the sadness of evil prevailing. The fact that he left the hero, Tally, somewhat malevolent was a very wry twist.
Which leads to the other trouble I had with the end: Tally’s Mary-Sue-ishness was left unresolved for me. I mean, David tells her that Maddy creates a safer cure because she sees that Tally is able to think her way out of the brain damage. Ok. But there was never another instance of someone else thinking their way out of being pretty, or special entirely on their own. The cutters needed some other form of exterior thought provocation if you will. So why Tally? What was it about her that made her able to do what no one else had done in the last 300 years of post-Rusty history? Guilt? Love? Teenaged Angst? I just didn’t see any of those things as being strong enough to cause a change in ability which was that amazing.
I think I liked these books a lot, and I may just have to do some more processing before I’ve decided how well I liked them. And whether or not to lend them to my mother to read …. hmmm.