So my, the pacing on this is terrible.

I mentioned back with the truck ride that Rhine’s ability to handle it despite her apparent trauma was acceptable because it seemed necessary to get things moving, but we saw shortly after that wasn’t true at all – they don’t end up having to hitchhike home and the placement of the restaurant they rob is arbitrary, so they could have just found their way there on foot. Having Rhine talk Gabriel out of taking advantage of the trucks would illustrate she’s the one in charge of the trip and that she’s not perfect at the same time! It’d have been great.

And why did we only see three places, anyway? She hits the carnival, which gets a lot of time spent on it despite not really mattering much in the end, then she ducks into the fortune teller who seems to only be there because the author was in a carnival mood and also wanted us to know Rhine is special (it’d have been so easy to stick the fortune telling into the actual carnival…or better yet, remove it because it’s stupid), then the creepy first-gen couple, then buses and they’re done.

She should be seeing so much more. I guess it’s because this setting is more of a set than a world, so there’s not much to explore. But in that case it should’ve been streamlined. Say they have money in the bag for the bus (or jewelry to barter), then it runs out when they reach the first-gen town. Or maybe Maddie gets them kicked off, so they’re stuck for the night until the next bus. It’d be nice to see her actually causing them trouble rather than being an angelic little sufferer with cute antics. There could even be an actual reason they go to the restaurant – it’s freezing out, so they need shelter, and washing dishes is easy but tiresome, so they figure a restaurant might let them sleep in the kitchen in return for doing the chores and they can eat the leftovers while they’re at it. For people moving around in winter, the weather’s barely mentioned!

(They also should’ve mentioned why stealing another boat wasn’t an option, such as the increasingly cold weather and Maddie’s inability to swim. And are there no ferries? That should’ve been a consideration. Moving things by water tends to be cheap, so people should be taking advantage of it.)

Really, this book could’ve been just the story of them getting back home and end on her finding the place burned. That’s kind of what middle books are for.

And there’s so much glossed over once she does get there! Are the other houses occupied or not? Why doesn’t she ask people what happened? For that matter, since apparently arson went ignored, do they have any fire department? New York is actually really dangerous in the fire respect due to the fact it’s wall to wall buildings. Why can’t we see her actually investigating things, and why don’t Rowan’s actions have any impact? We even have the guy he stole from just being peevish and saying Rowan had better not come back.

And the orphanage is basically a fluffier mansion that doesn’t make sense. Where are they getting the money when no one works? And if they have the money, why aren’t they taking in more kids than they are now? In terms of the most good, just running a giant soup kitchen for the street kids and giving them somewhere to not freeze at night would be worth more than piano and finger paint for a few.

And…not much more to say. The book’s been kind of boring, which is really not the complaint I was expecting. It’s still terrible, but it’s not the incredible terribleness I wanted. It’s mediocrely awful, the worst thing. The writing isn’t even all that pretty.

Let’s talk about the setting and throw out some random ideas.

Here’s one of the problems. There should be original human DNA around somewhere. Even if they’d started cremating pre-superbabies and not post-collapse, and even if they were so gung-ho they had a big campaign to dig up older bodies and burn them too, there’d be bodies somewhere. There’d be some frozen guy on a mountain they could thaw. Or dig up. They should be able to figure out that’s different.

So okay! They’re colonists. There’s no way they could’ve removed all dead bodies from their surroundings unless there weren’t many to start with, but on a brand new planet, it’s pretty believable.

This isn’t Earth. They were colonists, and they’ve only been here a few generations. We haven’t heard anything about what “America” and its “states” actually look like, so people just divided up the existing landmass along those lines. That’s why the weather makes no sense and why the oranges are fine with it. It’s also why Manhattan is still there instead of collapsed under its own weight, their Manhattan was set on somewhat stabler and less stupidly below the water table ground, and also built with a higher level of technology that’s resisting the neglect better.

When they say “America” was the only one to survive the war because of its superior technology, they mean it had rockets enough to get some people to safety. When they talk about the rest of the continents getting destroyed, it really happened, but it was in the sense the whole planet’s destroyed. The satellite thing might be later hyperbole, or maybe people got confused about what happened oddly fast and really don’t know they’re not original America, so they tried to go look for the other places but on this planet, there’s only one land mass.

Or maybe they deliberately lied, which makes more sense.

Maintaining their current level of technology was really hard due to the population collapse involved in going from a healthy world full of technology to a small bunch of Americans, a lot of whom were there only because they were close enough to be shoveled onto the ships in time. And after an excess of technology destroyed their world, they didn’t really want to preserve that capability anyway.

That’s why the technology doesn’t make sense. It was supposed to be a controlled descent, where they kept around some pieces of advanced tech to make things easier but lost the people who could build them. The superbabies were meant to be the last bit or so – maybe people were reproducing in artificial wombs before then and they needed to change people around to get them back to being able to have kids naturally. The original tech level could’ve been pretty high and involved a lot more dependance on it.

And as a result, they don’t have access to any normal DNA.

Maybe the superbabies could be the final model but the intervening years were a lot of prototypes, all of which turned out to have the same mayfly-kids error but no one noticed because, since they weren’t the finished product, none of them ever reproduced. (This would also explain why there seems to be one single giant batch of superbabies.) By the time the superbabies were finalized, the originals were near the end of their lifespan. They were cremated long before anyone realized the problem.

Or maybe the pre-superbabies people can’t reproduce naturally, so we can’t just look to them, and they just never brought ordinary human DNA, so looking at corpse DNA doesn’t help. And the artificial wombs were likely at the end of their lifespan by that point, so in the intervening forty years it took them to realize the superbabies were having mayfly kids, they were gone. And no one has any idea how to make this stuff because they didn’t preserve the blueprints because they thought people needed less science in their lives. (Bonus, this explains where the hell the naturalist cult comes from, this society started off with serious issues about science.) The people who did the original genetic manipulation were already old when they finished it and they didn’t train anyone new because it was another technology they thought was dangerous. The superbabies were supposed to be the end of it, humanity was supposed to be moderately self-sufficient and capable of maintaining itself on the cars and electricity level.

This is also why no one seems to know what science is. It makes no sense for people to have just forgotten how to do genetic engineering, and if nothing else there’d still be books left for new people to learn about it, but it’s entirely possible to refuse to teach anyone what genetic engineering is and deliberately destroy the books, especially if you don’t have a huge existing infrastructure that needs removing and are dealing with a tiny population. Even the people doing it a hundred years ago probably didn’t have the best grasp of its workings, which explains how they accidentally screwed up, and were probably relying mostly on some old machine to do it for them that was melted down for scrap before a single second-gen was even born.

Or maybe it doesn’t matter how it happened or even if they’re still on an earth coated in original model corpses. Maybe no one knows what DNA is.

These people are trying to cargo cult their way through laboratories and experiments. They know genetic engineering is done by viruses and they know that something went wrong, so they’re looking for “the virus” that’s causing the deaths, which they do by looking at cells under microscopes because that’s a thing you do and staring at deformed kids because appearance and behavior are determined by genes, right? That’s why the science of this is full of words that no one seems to understand the meaning of.

Maybe they don’t know the scientific method. Look at the history of alchemy. All these people were doing all these experiments that supposedly turned lead to gold or grew a miniature human or summoned fire salamanders, and when it didn’t work, they just went back to the book and tried again because it couldn’t possibly be that the author was just making shit up based on some other arbitrary rules they made up earlier, which were based on a third made up system from some other guy who was high on mushrooms. Okay, this time cinnabar and mercury didn’t work, maybe heating it more would help, or throwing babies in or doing it under a full more or something. Convince people that something’s already known and to just keep doing that until it works, and you can stop actual science in its tracks.

This is why Evil Mad Scientist thinks he’s on the way to the cure and can give an estimated date when everyone else is just assuming it’ll happen at some point somehow. He’s the only guy to realize hospitals have any connection to data mining. He’s been doing actual studies and having experiments where he tests variables, and he’s learned things. Everyone else has been staring at blood samples in tubes hoping it’ll spell out the solution for them. No one else in this world knows anything about “the virus” or how it works or why it’s happening He, in contrast, kept someone alive an extra five months after the final stage of symptoms kicked in. And that was just his first try.

There’s also an even simpler solution to this whole mess: there’s no genetic engineering. Cut that whole thing out.

The superbabies do not appear to be super in any noticeable way. They’re old looking at seventy and Rhine doesn’t expect them to live much longer, they certainly don’t seem to be brighter and there’s no sign of them being better in other ways. Supposedly they’re healthy, not that this matters much, and I guess there’s no deformities, not that this matters too much either – I mean, what percentage of the current population is deformed? Nothing in the plot changes if they’re not superbabies. The author seems to have thought this was a good explanation for the second gen dying and not a gigantic plot hole, but the author’s an idiot.

So there’s some virus that kills the young, and you’re safe past a certain age. Attempts at a sterile chamber for babies have failed because all the adults are infected and it’s super contagious. Or the original virus infected the sex cells and the babies are all born with it in every cell of their body, which would also finally let us reconcile the idea it’s a virus that’s in their genes.

We can still have messed up genes even with the superbabies removed, too… So long as the alterations aren’t the same as the reason for early death, there’s no reason for people to do anything about them.

Last chapter I suggested oxytocin screwups could’ve done some stuff to their behavior. Oxytocin is involved in pair bonding and small group bonding – it makes you like and trust those people more at the cost of hating and fearing everyone else.

Oxytocin also has to do with inducing initial mothering behavior, which would fit with how the girls seem to mother each other at times but not be very good at consistent behavior. And interestingly, it seems to reduce the symptoms of autism, which seems to be what the fantasy “malformed” disorder is talking about. Perhaps an overload of oxytocin early on leads to their brains developing resistance, or just the alterations to DNA led to that area being much more unstable and prone to being damaged when people reproduce, so those kids can’t produce even normal levels on their own. (Also, apparently it’s used to reduce brain activity in fetuses to prevent them from getting brain damage from lack of oxygen during delivery – so an overdose or a developed resistance there could easily cause them to just be born with messed up brains.) (Also, as far as I can tell the “malformed” type appear to be more commonly from the second gens, which means there’s been two chances for the DNA to screw up.)

The only part that doesn’t fit is that it seems like it’s supposed to encourage monogamy, but it’s easy enough to say that the increased pressure toward polygamy is more than enough to override that. (And we do see the men are more monogamous than you might expect given women are property – Rapist-chan sticks to his first wife originally and only gets three more afterward, and Rhine’s example of extravagance is men with just seven wives. Given the gatherers seem fine with killing their unwanted stock, it doesn’t seem like it’d cost all that much more to just get a whole truck full, but no one seems interested in doing that. They also don’t seem to be fucking their servants, which is even weirder. And the president-king has a mere nine wives instead of fucking his way through the whole population.)

This would also explain why none of the non-gatherer men seem to have any interest in stopping the gatherers in general, they only care about the one girl they know, why so many men seem fine being gatherers – hey, it’s not their girlfriend so who cares? – and might even explain why brothels are such a big deal, everyone’s a bunch of stressed rats and sex makes them happier than usual.

And, assuming that the implementation of this was half as shitty as every other example of science we’ve seen in the book, it might also explain why people’s characterization is so inconsistent. Giving people a hit of oxytocin can cause a noticeable behavior change, and normally oxytocin is released in low levels in lots of different circumstances – if they’re getting massive spikes of bonding-and-hate-strangers chemicals every time instead, that’d make them act oddly.

They might also be primed to be sociopaths, as was suggested by Zolnier. Mild sociopathy makes you more successful so long as you still understand obvious crimes will get you jailed. Incidentally, sociopaths are also pretty good at the caring about people around them only – in their case it’s apparently more as a sort of territorial/property thing, but what matters for us is that this would be along the same behavioral lines of ingroup matters, outgroup should be fucked over as soon as possible and maybe murdered for good measure.

On top of that, this is genetic engineering, and like I said, the fun part about sudden additions to DNA is they’re significantly less stable.

In other words, the second gens are likely split into three basics types:

Regular expression, who are mildly sociopathic to the same level as the first gens. Rhine and her brother.
Throwbacks, who behave like recognizable humans – your Graces, your Cecilys, the people who rushed to help the injured.
Duplicated expression, who have exaggerated/full blown sociopathy. The gatherers are likely made up largely of these.

(We don’t even need gene duplication to explain the last one, either – sociopathy has an environmental component, so if the kids would be mildly sociopathic if raised in a loving, stable home, throwing them onto the streets at five when their parents die can’t be helping.)

Also, one of the components of antisocial behavior is hormone malfunctions in the brain, so combine this with people fucking with oxytocin and other chemicals and you have a recipe for any number of disasters.

A third thing to consider is depression.

Depression helps the world go round! It’s very important for keeping our current social structure intact.

Let me tell you about guinea pigs. Guinea pigs have a hierarchy like many animals. The lowest ranking guinea pigs will be bullied when they go near the food and water, and so kept away. This is a beautiful system designed to ensure that the fitter guinea pigs get the best stuff so that in the event of resource stress, everyone’s already decided who’ll die first and don’t need to waste time fighting. Now, give a guinea pig prozac. The dominant one aggresses, it ignores this, it eats and drinks normally. Prozac has broken their beautiful system in half. All the guinea pigs are now eating and drinking instead of some being bullied into submission and eventual death. It’s horrible.

Now, think about America’s current pyramid structure of wealthy. Think about the many, many shitty jobs we have that we make people do for very little money. Think about the lack of health care, the pollution, the crappy housing that’s all they can afford despite the longer and longer hours.

What keeps those people chugging along instead of forming into a mob and tearing the .1% limb from bronzed limb? The same social hierarchy. The sense that you deserve this and should care what the higher ranked guinea pigs say. Unhappiness is the source of glorious, glorious stability.

So jam that in the kids. That’s why everyone’s trudging back to their terrible jobs each day. That’s why theft isn’t rampant. That’s why the rioters seem to only be the dominant first gens, and even that’s rare. That’s why everyone’s miserable but no one will do anything about it. That’s why most of society has decided that lying down and dying is the right answer.

Rhine thinks the world falling apart came because of the short lifespan of the new kids, but it seems to have been well on its way already. Most of the first gens we’ve seen are doing menial labor, which means they weren’t educated at the time and class divisions were so ingrained that even when the second gens started dying and first gens were the only people you could could actually train up, it still didn’t take advantage of them. The presidency is a monarchy. Even the seventy year olds don’t seem to remember days when women weren’t property. All anyone’s stories about it being better before are just that kids used to not die young. That’s it. You’d expect that to be the cause of the rest, but there’s no sign of anyone remembering anything else being better.

And this answers the question of how they managed to have a single giant generation of superbabies when some people have more money than others – the rich pushed it through for everyone. Their kids would be well-behaved. The lower classes would be obedient and stop squawking about dwindling wages and disappearing rights and sick days.

And finally, once again I’d like to suggest that this setting could be so cool if what was really going on is people released all sorts of social engineering viruses to do all kinds of stuff, and that’s what made their society fall apart. “A few dozen wizards mad scientists did it” covers every possible issue this book has. Why isn’t there more crime? Virus. Why gatherers? Virus. Where did orange trees that enjoy heaps of snow come from? Virus. What’s up with the impossibly skilled child slaves? Virus. That could make a futuristic setting that’s chaotic and alien enough to be worth it. If the author couldn’t make it work out from just one factor, she could have thrown in dozens and said it worked out how she wanted.