Newsflesh rec post: because sometimes "Because GEORGIA!" just isn't explanation enough.
In a discussion thread with 
chomiji a few weeks ago (among other things, I was asking for advice about being in a book fandom), my new head-over-heels love for the Newsflesh books came up, and she mentioned not being into horror. For some reason, until then I wasn't really planning to write a "why people should read these books I'm into" post, but ever since then I've been feeling the need. See, horror novels aren't my thing either, and these are so far from my association with horror that I managed to spend a month or so cheerfully telling everyone I'd fallen for a series of zombie novels without actually cluing in that "zombie novel" usually means "horror". Oops?
So here's my rec post. It deals mainly with the first book, because the second and third build so heavily on what comes before them that it's basically impossible to discuss their plots. I'm generally anti-spoiler to begin with, but there are things in these books that you really, really don't want to be spoiled for. This post is accordingly as spoiler-free as I can make it.
(Note: all unattributed quotes in this post come from Georgia Mason. I used them fairly liberally because I find these books eminently quotable; I was completely unable to use most of my favorites because they're wildly spoilery. So it goes.)
The Newsflesh trilogy is by Mira Grant, a pseudonym for seanan_mcguire. It consists of Feed (2011 Hugo Award nominee), Deadline (2012 Hugo Award nominee), and Blackout (New York Times bestseller). There're also a couple of novellas set in the same universe, the first of which, "Countdown", was also up for a Hugo this year.
[Update: Blackout is up for the 2013 Hugo for Best Novel, and "San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats", the second Newsflesh novella, is up for the 2013 Hugo for Best Novella. The third novella, "How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea", was released in July 2013.]
The books are all written in first person, although the narrator changes periodically. The chapter breaks include various characters' blog post excerpts, unpublished writing, and emails, giving a wider array of perspectives. They're a fast read--clever writing, engaging characters, a lot of stuff going on--and they can turn on a dime from "hey, that was entertaining" to "did that just HAPPEN?"
(When I began writing this post, it occurred to me that, in retrospect, the only weird thing about my having fallen this hard for Georgia, who narrates Feed, is that it didn't happen when I first read the book in 2010.)
Newsflesh is set 26 years after the zombie Rising transformed the world. The zombies and the associated virus are a critical backdrop for everything that happens, but as Georgia says, they're not the story and haven't been since 2014. The series has a ton of interesting world-building, various details of which work better for some people than others, and I'm not going to really get into it because, as always, I'm all about the characters. That said, I find a lot of the ways the world's changed very interesting.
One thing I did learn from those [journalism] classes is that the world is not, in any way, what people expected thirty years ago. The zombies are here, and they're not going away, but they're not the story. They were, for one hot, horrible summer at the beginning of the century, but now they're just another piece of the way things work. They did their part: They changed everything. Absolutely everything.
*****The [hazard] zones start at Level 10, the code for any area with resident mammals of sufficient body mass to undergo Kellis-Amberlee amplification and reanimation. Humans count. Level 9 means those mammals are not entirely kept in confinement. Buffy's neighborhood is considered a Level 10 hazard zone, which means it's safe to let your children play outside, except for the part where it would instantly convert the zone to a Level 9.
*****I just find it interesting that kids apparently used to cry when Bambi’s mother died. George and I both held our breaths, and then cheered when she didn’t reanimate and try to eat her son. (Shaun Mason, Deadline)
So: Feed opens in 2039 with a 23-year-old sibling pair of journalists itching to make their mark on the world. Their big break comes when their blogging team is chosen as part of the press corps for a senator's presidential campaign, and what should have been a dream job lands them neck-deep in a political conspiracy that they can't tear themselves away from because Georgia doesn't know how to live without going after the truth.
I wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson, ripping the skin off the world. I wanted the truth, and I wanted the news, and I’d be damned before I settled for anything less.
Shaun’s the same, even if his priorities are different. He’s willing to let a good story come before the facts, as long as the essential morals stay true. That’s why he’s so good at what he does, and why I double-check every report he writes before I release it.
Georgia Mason--"George" to her brother--is a factual news blogger. She's snarky, intelligent, cynical, stubborn as hell, relatively handy with guns, disabled (courtesy of the live form of the zombie-making Kellis-Amberlee virus having made itself at home in her eyes), and focused on the truth to the exclusion of everything else. She's very objective; she's also perhaps not as objective as she thinks she is. You do not want her to come after you. If there's a reason for her to come after you, it's probably something you don't want the whole world to know about.
It's worth mentioning that Georgia is that rare disabled character whose disability is never treated as anything other than one inconvenient aspect of her life, rather than in any way defining it. Her eyes mean that she has chronic pain and limitations with her vision, both of which can be debilitating but are largely manageable as long as she has a reasonable amount of control over her environment. There are no Very Special Lessons or Inspiring Stories About Overcoming Adversity here, and neither the text nor other characters ever treat her as incapable or as someone who needs either pity or looking after. (Her brother takes care of her in some ways, but I'd like to think that's a given. She takes care of him just as often.)
Shaun spends his time moving, planning to move, and coming up with new ways to move, many of them involving heavy explosives or the undead. I spend my time writing, thinking about writing, and trying to come up with new things I can write about. Sleep has never been high on the priority list for either of us, which is probably a blessing in disguise. We kept each other amused as kids. If one of us had actually wanted to get some rest, we would have made each other crazy.
*****I am personally opposed to mission statements, since they're basically one more way of sucking the fun out of everything. I tried telling George this. She told me that it's her job to suck the fun out of everything. She then threatened physical violence of a type I will not describe in detail, as it might unsettle and upset my theoretical readership. Suffice to say that I am writing a mission statement. Here it is:
I, Shaun Phillip Mason, being of sound mind and body, do hereby swear to poke dead things with sticks, do stupid things for your amusement, and put it all on the Internet where you can watch it over and over again. Because that's what you want, right?
--From Hail to the King, the blog of Shaun Mason, June 20, 2035
Georgia's brother, Shaun, is an action news blogger, AKA an "Irwin", which means he spends his time hurling himself into danger on camera and making it look like both the most fun and the most deadly thing in the world. When most of the population is too scared to get out into the world and do much of anything, Irwins let them live vicariously. The Irwin endgame philosophy runs along the lines of "try to stay alive, but make sure that your inevitable death is spectacular and happens on camera". The closer the call, the better the ratings.
As you might expect from someone in that line of work, Shaun is on the aggressive side; either charming or obnoxious, depending on your point of view; an expert with firearms; a huge fan of explosives; and suicidally confident in his own immortality. (Georgia's not really joking when she talks about her "inevitable future as an only child".) He's generally content to be the muscle while Georgia provides the critical thinking, but there's a perfectly good brain under his professional facade. He knows what her limits are and he steps up when she starts pushing them too hard.
[Steve's] expression was a familiar one. We've been seeing it from teachers, friends, colleagues, and hotel concierges since we hit puberty. It's the "you'd rather share a room with your opposite-gender sibling than sleep alone?" face, and it never fails to irritate me. Social norms can bite me. If I need to have someone guarding my back when the living dead show up to make my life more interesting than I want it to be, I want that someone to be Shaun. He's a light sleeper, and I know he can aim.
*****Anyone who messes with Shaun is messing with me. And of the two of us, I swear, I am the one you do not want to mess with. He'll kill you. But I will make you sorry, and I will make you pay.
Trust me. I'm a journalist.
--Georgia Mason, unpublished blog post
Georgia and Shaun are very little alike, but they're completely inextricable. They're excellent at their jobs. They're overwhelmingly codependent and fierce about each other. They're also very pragmatic about the deeply fucked-up childhood that made them that way: shit happens, and if it hadn't happened to them, they wouldn't have each other, so it all balances out.
That doesn't mean they got out unscathed.
A lifetime spent within arm's reach and counting primarily on each other has left us a little dependent on one another's company. In an earlier, zombie-free era, this would have been dubbed "co-dependence" and resulted in years of therapy, culminating in us hating each other's guts. Adoptive siblings aren't supposed to treat each other like they're the center of the world.
A full-fledged blogging team needs to be a triple threat. It has to have a Newsie (Georgia), an Irwin (Shaun), and a Fictional--a fictional blogger being someone who shares their perspective on the world through stories or poetry. Georgia and Shaun's partner presents as an air-headed, sparkly blonde, blithely distracting people from the fact that she's a tech wizard who's recording them from about fifteen different angles. She earns her living by making computers dance like puppets and by writing epic, melodramatic work that earns her a fairly devoted following. Also, she goes by "Buffy", because--as she explains, much to Georgia and Shaun's confusion--what else would a perky blonde call herself post-zombie apocalypse?
Buffy's real name is Georgette Meissonier. Like Shaun and me, she was born after the zombies became a fact of life, during the period when Georgia, Georgette, and Barbara were the three most common girl's names in America. We are the Jennifers of our generation. Most of us just rolled over and took it. After all, George Romero is considered one of the accidental saviors of the human race, and it's not like being named after him is uncool. It's just, well, common. And Buffy has never been willing to be common if she can help it.
When the trio is selected to help cover Senator Peter Ryman's presidential campaign, their news site, After the End Times, is born. These three are the only staff members to initially hit the road with the campaign, but before setting out they hire a slew of beta bloggers for their respective divisions. That small army of support staff is made up of smart, ambitious people who are increasingly called on to prove their dedication and mettle as Georgia, Shaun, and Buffy begin unearthing a conspiracy that risks and changes all of their lives.
The beta bloggers don't have a lot of on-screen presence in Feed, but the two following books are very all-hands-on-deck and give several of them a lot more time to shine, which showcases the main characters' collective gift for hiring fantastic, loyal people.
Mahir is located in London, England, and he’s great for dry, factual reporting that neither pretties things up nor dumbs them down. If I have a second in command, it’s Mahir. Alaric can build suspense almost as well as an Irwin, fitting his narration and description into the natural blank spots in a recording. And Becks would have been a horror movie director if we weren’t all practically living in a horror movie these days. Her sense of timing is impeccable, and her cut shots are even better. Of the betas we’ve acquired, I count my Newsies as the best of the bunch.
Personally--and unsurprisingly--my focus is on the characters, but there's plenty of plot and action to go around. The books are full of politics and virology and conspiracy. The dialogue is what you'd hope for from quick-witted people whose jobs involve engaging and keeping an audience's attention, whether they're reporting on political rallies or running for their lives.
The books don't dwell on the gruesome details of the actual undead or fall into the mindset that I, at least, associate with "horror". The prospect of becoming a zombie is treated as a disturbing inevitability, since the nature of the Kellis-Amberlee virus means that absolutely everyone will reanimate after their death if appropriate steps aren't taken immediately. Guns are commonplace, both for protection and for sparing other people the experience of amplifying into a zombie if they're bitten or fatally wounded.
People's mindsets have changed accordingly, as you'd expect. Georgia could probably do her job without risking herself much, but she regularly goes into the field with Shaun. It's a good way to get a story, but more importantly, she fully expects him to slip up someday and wouldn't be able to live with herself if she weren't there to make sure he dies without ever becoming a zombie himself. The series treats this as a simple fact of life without glossing over the awfulness of it. If there's horror in these books, that's where it is.
And this is where I have to stop, because again, the things I would love to tell you--themes, character developments, all of it--are too spoilery. Newsflesh is great in all kinds of ways, but IMO, the most important thing to take away from this post is this: you should read these books because GEORGIA. She's brilliant and prickly and amazing and loves her brother with the fire of a thousand suns. Go meet her.
Originally posted at http://umadoshi.dreamwidth.org/400575.html. Comment here if you like, or comment there using OpenID. Comments at DW:
chomiji a few weeks ago (among other things, I was asking for advice about being in a book fandom), my new head-over-heels love for the Newsflesh books came up, and she mentioned not being into horror. For some reason, until then I wasn't really planning to write a "why people should read these books I'm into" post, but ever since then I've been feeling the need. See, horror novels aren't my thing either, and these are so far from my association with horror that I managed to spend a month or so cheerfully telling everyone I'd fallen for a series of zombie novels without actually cluing in that "zombie novel" usually means "horror". Oops?
So here's my rec post. It deals mainly with the first book, because the second and third build so heavily on what comes before them that it's basically impossible to discuss their plots. I'm generally anti-spoiler to begin with, but there are things in these books that you really, really don't want to be spoiled for. This post is accordingly as spoiler-free as I can make it.
(Note: all unattributed quotes in this post come from Georgia Mason. I used them fairly liberally because I find these books eminently quotable; I was completely unable to use most of my favorites because they're wildly spoilery. So it goes.)
The Newsflesh trilogy is by Mira Grant, a pseudonym for seanan_mcguire. It consists of Feed (2011 Hugo Award nominee), Deadline (2012 Hugo Award nominee), and Blackout (New York Times bestseller). There're also a couple of novellas set in the same universe, the first of which, "Countdown", was also up for a Hugo this year.
[Update: Blackout is up for the 2013 Hugo for Best Novel, and "San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats", the second Newsflesh novella, is up for the 2013 Hugo for Best Novella. The third novella, "How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea", was released in July 2013.]
The books are all written in first person, although the narrator changes periodically. The chapter breaks include various characters' blog post excerpts, unpublished writing, and emails, giving a wider array of perspectives. They're a fast read--clever writing, engaging characters, a lot of stuff going on--and they can turn on a dime from "hey, that was entertaining" to "did that just HAPPEN?"
(When I began writing this post, it occurred to me that, in retrospect, the only weird thing about my having fallen this hard for Georgia, who narrates Feed, is that it didn't happen when I first read the book in 2010.)
Newsflesh is set 26 years after the zombie Rising transformed the world. The zombies and the associated virus are a critical backdrop for everything that happens, but as Georgia says, they're not the story and haven't been since 2014. The series has a ton of interesting world-building, various details of which work better for some people than others, and I'm not going to really get into it because, as always, I'm all about the characters. That said, I find a lot of the ways the world's changed very interesting.
One thing I did learn from those [journalism] classes is that the world is not, in any way, what people expected thirty years ago. The zombies are here, and they're not going away, but they're not the story. They were, for one hot, horrible summer at the beginning of the century, but now they're just another piece of the way things work. They did their part: They changed everything. Absolutely everything.
*****The [hazard] zones start at Level 10, the code for any area with resident mammals of sufficient body mass to undergo Kellis-Amberlee amplification and reanimation. Humans count. Level 9 means those mammals are not entirely kept in confinement. Buffy's neighborhood is considered a Level 10 hazard zone, which means it's safe to let your children play outside, except for the part where it would instantly convert the zone to a Level 9.
*****I just find it interesting that kids apparently used to cry when Bambi’s mother died. George and I both held our breaths, and then cheered when she didn’t reanimate and try to eat her son. (Shaun Mason, Deadline)
So: Feed opens in 2039 with a 23-year-old sibling pair of journalists itching to make their mark on the world. Their big break comes when their blogging team is chosen as part of the press corps for a senator's presidential campaign, and what should have been a dream job lands them neck-deep in a political conspiracy that they can't tear themselves away from because Georgia doesn't know how to live without going after the truth.
I wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson, ripping the skin off the world. I wanted the truth, and I wanted the news, and I’d be damned before I settled for anything less.
Shaun’s the same, even if his priorities are different. He’s willing to let a good story come before the facts, as long as the essential morals stay true. That’s why he’s so good at what he does, and why I double-check every report he writes before I release it.
Georgia Mason--"George" to her brother--is a factual news blogger. She's snarky, intelligent, cynical, stubborn as hell, relatively handy with guns, disabled (courtesy of the live form of the zombie-making Kellis-Amberlee virus having made itself at home in her eyes), and focused on the truth to the exclusion of everything else. She's very objective; she's also perhaps not as objective as she thinks she is. You do not want her to come after you. If there's a reason for her to come after you, it's probably something you don't want the whole world to know about.
It's worth mentioning that Georgia is that rare disabled character whose disability is never treated as anything other than one inconvenient aspect of her life, rather than in any way defining it. Her eyes mean that she has chronic pain and limitations with her vision, both of which can be debilitating but are largely manageable as long as she has a reasonable amount of control over her environment. There are no Very Special Lessons or Inspiring Stories About Overcoming Adversity here, and neither the text nor other characters ever treat her as incapable or as someone who needs either pity or looking after. (Her brother takes care of her in some ways, but I'd like to think that's a given. She takes care of him just as often.)
Shaun spends his time moving, planning to move, and coming up with new ways to move, many of them involving heavy explosives or the undead. I spend my time writing, thinking about writing, and trying to come up with new things I can write about. Sleep has never been high on the priority list for either of us, which is probably a blessing in disguise. We kept each other amused as kids. If one of us had actually wanted to get some rest, we would have made each other crazy.
*****I am personally opposed to mission statements, since they're basically one more way of sucking the fun out of everything. I tried telling George this. She told me that it's her job to suck the fun out of everything. She then threatened physical violence of a type I will not describe in detail, as it might unsettle and upset my theoretical readership. Suffice to say that I am writing a mission statement. Here it is:
I, Shaun Phillip Mason, being of sound mind and body, do hereby swear to poke dead things with sticks, do stupid things for your amusement, and put it all on the Internet where you can watch it over and over again. Because that's what you want, right?
--From Hail to the King, the blog of Shaun Mason, June 20, 2035
Georgia's brother, Shaun, is an action news blogger, AKA an "Irwin", which means he spends his time hurling himself into danger on camera and making it look like both the most fun and the most deadly thing in the world. When most of the population is too scared to get out into the world and do much of anything, Irwins let them live vicariously. The Irwin endgame philosophy runs along the lines of "try to stay alive, but make sure that your inevitable death is spectacular and happens on camera". The closer the call, the better the ratings.
As you might expect from someone in that line of work, Shaun is on the aggressive side; either charming or obnoxious, depending on your point of view; an expert with firearms; a huge fan of explosives; and suicidally confident in his own immortality. (Georgia's not really joking when she talks about her "inevitable future as an only child".) He's generally content to be the muscle while Georgia provides the critical thinking, but there's a perfectly good brain under his professional facade. He knows what her limits are and he steps up when she starts pushing them too hard.
[Steve's] expression was a familiar one. We've been seeing it from teachers, friends, colleagues, and hotel concierges since we hit puberty. It's the "you'd rather share a room with your opposite-gender sibling than sleep alone?" face, and it never fails to irritate me. Social norms can bite me. If I need to have someone guarding my back when the living dead show up to make my life more interesting than I want it to be, I want that someone to be Shaun. He's a light sleeper, and I know he can aim.
*****Anyone who messes with Shaun is messing with me. And of the two of us, I swear, I am the one you do not want to mess with. He'll kill you. But I will make you sorry, and I will make you pay.
Trust me. I'm a journalist.
--Georgia Mason, unpublished blog post
Georgia and Shaun are very little alike, but they're completely inextricable. They're excellent at their jobs. They're overwhelmingly codependent and fierce about each other. They're also very pragmatic about the deeply fucked-up childhood that made them that way: shit happens, and if it hadn't happened to them, they wouldn't have each other, so it all balances out.
That doesn't mean they got out unscathed.
A lifetime spent within arm's reach and counting primarily on each other has left us a little dependent on one another's company. In an earlier, zombie-free era, this would have been dubbed "co-dependence" and resulted in years of therapy, culminating in us hating each other's guts. Adoptive siblings aren't supposed to treat each other like they're the center of the world.
A full-fledged blogging team needs to be a triple threat. It has to have a Newsie (Georgia), an Irwin (Shaun), and a Fictional--a fictional blogger being someone who shares their perspective on the world through stories or poetry. Georgia and Shaun's partner presents as an air-headed, sparkly blonde, blithely distracting people from the fact that she's a tech wizard who's recording them from about fifteen different angles. She earns her living by making computers dance like puppets and by writing epic, melodramatic work that earns her a fairly devoted following. Also, she goes by "Buffy", because--as she explains, much to Georgia and Shaun's confusion--what else would a perky blonde call herself post-zombie apocalypse?
Buffy's real name is Georgette Meissonier. Like Shaun and me, she was born after the zombies became a fact of life, during the period when Georgia, Georgette, and Barbara were the three most common girl's names in America. We are the Jennifers of our generation. Most of us just rolled over and took it. After all, George Romero is considered one of the accidental saviors of the human race, and it's not like being named after him is uncool. It's just, well, common. And Buffy has never been willing to be common if she can help it.
When the trio is selected to help cover Senator Peter Ryman's presidential campaign, their news site, After the End Times, is born. These three are the only staff members to initially hit the road with the campaign, but before setting out they hire a slew of beta bloggers for their respective divisions. That small army of support staff is made up of smart, ambitious people who are increasingly called on to prove their dedication and mettle as Georgia, Shaun, and Buffy begin unearthing a conspiracy that risks and changes all of their lives.
The beta bloggers don't have a lot of on-screen presence in Feed, but the two following books are very all-hands-on-deck and give several of them a lot more time to shine, which showcases the main characters' collective gift for hiring fantastic, loyal people.
Mahir is located in London, England, and he’s great for dry, factual reporting that neither pretties things up nor dumbs them down. If I have a second in command, it’s Mahir. Alaric can build suspense almost as well as an Irwin, fitting his narration and description into the natural blank spots in a recording. And Becks would have been a horror movie director if we weren’t all practically living in a horror movie these days. Her sense of timing is impeccable, and her cut shots are even better. Of the betas we’ve acquired, I count my Newsies as the best of the bunch.
Personally--and unsurprisingly--my focus is on the characters, but there's plenty of plot and action to go around. The books are full of politics and virology and conspiracy. The dialogue is what you'd hope for from quick-witted people whose jobs involve engaging and keeping an audience's attention, whether they're reporting on political rallies or running for their lives.
The books don't dwell on the gruesome details of the actual undead or fall into the mindset that I, at least, associate with "horror". The prospect of becoming a zombie is treated as a disturbing inevitability, since the nature of the Kellis-Amberlee virus means that absolutely everyone will reanimate after their death if appropriate steps aren't taken immediately. Guns are commonplace, both for protection and for sparing other people the experience of amplifying into a zombie if they're bitten or fatally wounded.
People's mindsets have changed accordingly, as you'd expect. Georgia could probably do her job without risking herself much, but she regularly goes into the field with Shaun. It's a good way to get a story, but more importantly, she fully expects him to slip up someday and wouldn't be able to live with herself if she weren't there to make sure he dies without ever becoming a zombie himself. The series treats this as a simple fact of life without glossing over the awfulness of it. If there's horror in these books, that's where it is.
And this is where I have to stop, because again, the things I would love to tell you--themes, character developments, all of it--are too spoilery. Newsflesh is great in all kinds of ways, but IMO, the most important thing to take away from this post is this: you should read these books because GEORGIA. She's brilliant and prickly and amazing and loves her brother with the fire of a thousand suns. Go meet her.
Originally posted at http://umadoshi.dreamwidth.org/400575.html. Comment here if you like, or comment there using OpenID. Comments at DW: