“I’m here,” Roland calls from outside the FedEx jet. “What do you want?”
Connor remains hidden inside the hold. He knows he’s only going to get one chance at this, so he’s got to do it right. “Come inside, and we’ll talk about it.”
“No, you come out.”
Nice try, Connor thinks, but this is going to be on my terms.
In fiction, this is the role a villain plays.
Back to Connor again.
Roland is slowly breaking. He confesses to many things, petty acts of vandalism and theft, that Connor couldn’t care less about.
I am really ambivalent about this.
And now let’s find out what Roland’s actually doing.
(more…)
Risa’s chapter jumps back and forth between more cheery evil stupid adult chatter and her talking about the place. Mostly, it’s about how special Connor is. She’s advised not to stay friends with the so-called Akron AWOL because surely the more we tell kids he’s a big deal the less they’ll think he’s a big deal, and she goes on about how upset she was about what happened to him.
Physically, he was not harmed in any way. It would not do to damage the merchandise. Psychologically, however, that’s a different story. They paraded him through the grounds for nearly twenty minutes. Then they took off his shackles and just left him there by the flagpole. No trip to the “welcome center,” no orientation, nothing.
Oh no, no welcome center!
Connor tells us they’re in thirty-kid dormitories and that before dinner he sees two beds have been stripped, and no one mentions it.
Conner can’t remember either the names or the faces of the missing kids, and that haunts him.
Connor has never given a solitary fuck.
(more…)
Time for Roland to die.
So now Connor’s going through the same oh god how can the person I thought was safe be not safe thing Lev did, but because he’s a sucky protagonist he just thinks this instead of doing anything.
And then the guards come to get him.
(more…)
Part Seven
Consciousness
I think I said earlier that there were eight parts, but apparently it’s just seven. So almost done!
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us . . . Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
This perfectly encapsulates all the quotes of this book. There’s no coherent tone. Sometimes it’s pretentious stuff, sometimes it’s a joke. And here at the end, it’s also riding the coattails of other, cleverer people.
Anyway, we’re all really here to find out if Connor-sue made it through with real injuries.
Alright, let’s hear from the kid who failed to blow himself up.
(more…)
There’s a sprawling ranch in west Texas.
The money to build it came from oil that had long since dried up, but the money remained and multiplied. Now there’s a whole compound, an oasis as green as a golf course in the middle of the flat, wild plains.
I’d just like to break in here and say that this is why that whole area is turning into desert. Water management is important.
So in conclusion, this book is shitty prolife propaganda by someone who’s prolife but not fanatic about it because he doesn’t see what the big deal is, really. It opens by saying that the world it presents, where abortions are banned in return for killing older kids for organs, is the result of a compromise between prolife and prochoice people, and while it will never work up the guts to actually say it directly, this means that murdering older children from organs has to be the demand of the prochoice side, because we know the prolife side’s demand was to stop abortions.
Then for some reason it insists evil is really about caring about things instead of just going along with what the government tells you, and that people who deliberately fight back are the real monsters. I think the sickest part of this is it actually does admit women can get pregnant and it’s not their fault with Risa, but it doesn’t care, because if Risa actually was raped and got pregnant, she’d be worthless and we shouldn’t care what happens to her. Besides, what about the fetus’ bodily rights? Especially when unlike Risa, it’d still be a virgin.
I really don’t have the stomach to go through and summarize things in any more detail than that. Point is, the book is terrible and the author is terrible.
Last break for this I went through all the different sorts of stories you could tell with the basic idea, and let’s now demonstrate you could tell this exact plotline without it being terrible. Let’s go over just how utterly this failed solely on narrative grounds.
UnStrung, the 1.5 novella that I won’t call a cashgrab because it’s actually some pretty substantial racist garbage and not a couple pages like Seeds of Wither, says it’s cowriten with a Michelle Knowlden, who seems to mostly write detective stories. I don’t know if it’s her fault this is so terrible or if it’s just that he was testing the water with his Old Umber Talking black kid before he really went for it. (more…)
I decided that with measels in the news, I felt like checking out this monstrosity again.
See, the whole vaccine connection would be somewhat topical, you know? I keep hearing people on the news trying to explain that when parents choose not to vaccinate, it’s not just their kid they’re affecting, it’s all the other kids! Because it’s okay to kill your own child, they’re your property.
So imagine the fight being about conflicting parental rights, and the fallout is that stuff which impacts other people’s children is mandatory, like vaccinations, and stuff that doesn’t impact other people’s children, like cutting them up for parts, is entirely up to the parent. You can even keep the abortion ban because thinking women need to suffer unborn children have rights and actual children don’t is a sort of doublethink we’re already familiar with.
You’d still have your teen appeal of parents betraying children and children not having rights. It just stops being presented as prochoice = murder and instead focuses on another issue that affects all children right now.
But that would not be endlessly terrible, so that will not be this book. Let’s just hope no more magical leprechauns show up to pretend to be an actual human ethnicity. (more…)
So before we dive in, I’d like to do a quick recap about what these books really are.
Although the book claims there was a big fight between prolife and prochoice people to kick this mess off, the actual book is written from the perspective of someone who is really obviously prolife and doesn’t seem to have any idea what prochoice people believe. This is not to say the prolife side is portrayed positively but it’s a dystopia based around the idea of what if the prolife side went too far and were evil like those horrible prochoice bastards. It’s sort of like if someone wrote a story where women could choose to do anything they wanted to their unborn children, like have them blinded or chunks of their brain removed so they’d be as smart as cats or altered so they’d only live to age three, and also free abortions any time you felt like it even up to the point of actual labor, which is a really bizarre but not totally baseless extension of the idea the mother should get to choose what happens in her body, and then said it was a compromise between the prochoice and prolife people who are both just as terrible even though nothing I just said has anything to do with what the prolife lobby wants and a bunch of what I said are things that would horrify them far more.
The book is written with the idea that abortion is just about murdering kids for the lulz and the only reason for not sucking it up and being a mommy is that liberalism has sold you on the idea that you’re a victim and can just abandon your sacred responsibility to be a childish leech on society. Its idea of being far and balanced is wondering if creating a world of hideous child neglect is worse than aborting the children and coming up with an epic shrug.
I myself am pro-abortion. I think abortions are great, be they for the health of the mother, birth control, or mercy for those who wouldn’t survive birth itself, and I view stopping abortion as saying you want women to die horrible deaths for having sex and leave behind broken families because that is objectively what happens when abortion is prevented. You are not banned from disputing this in the comments, but there is a really good chance I will respond with vitriol to you.
Last time, Connor 2: The Adopted Mixed Race Version. Also seriously, he’s going to be evil because none may challenge Connorsue and/or because adopted and mixed race, just warning you. (more…)