In which suddenly, I understand this book.
Lev gets a place in Detroit.
It would be a perfect situation for Lev, except for the fact that he doesn’t actually live there. True, there’s that subcutaneous tracking chip embedded in his neck that swears he does, but the chip was easily compromised. Now the chip can ping out a signal from wherever they want Lev to appear to be.
I’m not sure if the author fucked up the description or if he actually thinks it makes more sense to leave the chip in Lev’s neck and “compromise” it somehow so that the pings sound like they’re in a different location than they actually are.
Where Lev and possibly his still-embedded neck chip are is the Cavenaugh mansion, because yes, this mansion is big enough there’s no apostrophe S needed.
It was designed to look like Versailles and was built with motor money in the days before the American automotive industry had done its own version of clapping and applauded itself into nonexistence.
Well, I have been saying it looked like our economy’s finished collapsing by Unwind’s time, and yet, what an outdated way of looking at money! Money has no real source these days. You have it, so you put it into things, putting it into things inflates the price, a bubble forms, you pull it out and put it in new things, the bubble pops and everybody else becomes a little poorer and you just that much richer in comparison. Fortunes just circle around in the financial industry these days. They’re decoupled from actual industry.
Anyway, by quirk of history The mansion served as the Midwest headquarters for the Choice Brigade during the Heartland War, until it was captured and became headquarters for the Life Army. Apparently both the Lifers and Choicers saw great value in having their own personal Versailles.
This is so silly and contrived I’m going to assume it’s an intentional reference to when this sort of silliness really did happen during the Civil War. Of course, the Civil War took place over a much smaller area that was also much less built up, so…it’s not impossible things like that could happen again, but it’d probably be at places with actual strategic value and not a random mansion built with the meager “fortune” of actual honest to god industry.
until the day the Unwind Accord ended all battles, putting forth the worst possible compromise and yet the only one both sides could agree to: sanctity of life from conception to thirteen, with the option of unwinding teenagers whose lives were deemed to have been a mistake.
But forget all that and look at this.
The series has finally clicked into place.
I’ve been assuming this mapped on to the most common prolife standard, where it’s really about punishing women for getting pregnant. The bit about the mom skipping away from her responsibilities we got last book is a horror story they love to tell. But so much else about it didn’t fit and seemed just incoherent.
But this explains it.
Pregnancy = human life. Not pregnancy > human life . Not pregnancy = human life + other factions. Not pregnancy ≈ human life. Pregnancy is human life. Pregnancy is only ever exactly equal to a human life.
Go look at stuff prochoice people say and replace every single instance of “pregnancy” with “human life”. “This human life is a mistake.” Holy shit, those people are monsters.
This would also explain why this is one where there’s no exemption for rape or the slightest awareness pregnancy is difficult and sometimes fatal – it can’t be, because it’s only and exactly “human life” with only and exactly the impact of any human life on any other human life.
And that is one of the other stories prolife people say. I remember when I was in elementary or middle school and one of my friends told me about how abortion is terrible because they suck out the brain because if the head comes out they have to keep the premie alive, and there was this girl who didn’t have an arm because the doctor missed and sucked up her arm instead, and now she had to go through life knowing her mom had thought her life was a mistake.
(My response then: yeah fine but you guys are the ones who made it so they had to do the inside the womb procedure and couldn’t just stab her brain out once they realized it went wrong. My additional response now: you ban abortion and every baby in the adoption system gets to grow up thinking their mom would’ve rather killed them.)
I’m not totally clear how this works with fact “liberal” typically gets prefaced by “bleeding heart” and they’re not, stereotypically speaking, the ones disowning their children as mistakes. Maybe the division here is between tough-love prolifers who’ll beat the devil out of those children compared to namby-pamby liberals who just give up and shirk responsibility. The fact unwinding doesn’t involve personally killing the kid might just be highlighting how liberals are all hypocrites who’ll let horrible stuff happen as long as it’s happening elsewhere, while a true heartland American will take responsibility for their child rather than letting it be the government’s problem.
And perhaps this can even give a clue about why even adults fighting against unwinding are evil – it would make sense for them to be aligned more to the prolife side, given we’re literally talking about life here, but getting involved with other people’s kids is more a liberal thing. But if they’re a mix, or are in fact predominantly prochoice given, and I can’t repeat this enough, the prolife side got everything they wanted while even if we assume “declare kids a mistake and kill them for it” was a thing the prochoice side wanted they had to agree to wait over a decade, then of course the organization is evil. Some of them are pro-abortion. Some of them are only supporting these kids because they think killing teenager human life is wrong but they’re fine murdering baby human life.
Speaking of, the mansion and the trust are secretly part of the anti-divisional but still nebulously evil group. So yeah, that’s where that plot is going and not Hunger Games: Unwind Edition.
Pregnancy = human life. Not pregnancy > human life . Not pregnancy = human life + other factions. Not pregnancy ≈ human life. Pregnancy is human life. Pregnancy is only ever exactly equal to a human life.
I… could have sworn this was supposed to be a central tenet of ‘pro-life’ people? Like, I don’t even agree with them, and I know that’s what they think. Or claim to think. Maybe that’s just the party line, or something, and I’m horribly ignorant about the actual purposes of the ‘movement’.
I’ve been assuming this mapped on to the most common prolife standard, where it’s really about punishing women for getting pregnant.
I keep checking my glass, but there’s just orange juice. I’m not drinking tonight. Maybe I’m having a stroke, but I just don’t get this post at all. The most common prolife standard is about punishing women for getting pregnant? And the punishment is having abortions withheld? Doesn’t that pretty much imply that abortions are a good thing? How does anyone not punch a hole through that logic simply by looking at it too hard?
Most prolife stuff has exceptions for rape (even those that don’t usually phrase it with the attitude that it’s so women won’t claim rape and get away with an abortion – there was that infamous soundbite of a politician claiming that obviously rape victims shouldn’t be forced to stay pregnant but as was impossible to get pregnant by rape that terrible thing would never happen) and is in favor of things that raise pregnancy rates, like abstinence-only education and banning contraceptives. And there’s either an exception for abortion to save the life of the mother or else death by childbirth is glamorized. There’s also all that stuff about what women shouldn’t be allowed to do because it can harm the baby, which is again aware pregnancy is human life + other factors.
It’s really unusual to see something that’s utterly disconnected from everything else about pregnancy.
The most common prolife standard is about punishing women for getting pregnant?
The punishment for having sex is being pregnant, which is why it’s so very important to remove everything that could allow women to have sex without getting pregnant. Other good punishments include STDs and getting murdered.
That’s also why it’s okay to force them to stay pregnant even if the fetus dies. And even if they’ll die if the rotting corpse isn’t removed.
Maybe a miracle will bring the fetus back to life. It’s a human life, after all, and it’s not like God ever lets something bad happen to those.
I need some pho.
I think it’s more of a slippery slope mentality To the most extreme pro-lifers, if you let a woman get a dead fetus removed so she doesn’t die of sepsis, then that opens the door to women getting living fetuses removed just for shits and giggles.
I suspect it has to do with their general disregard for women’s health. If you’re not producing babies, what value do you have? So you can’t have birth control even if you want it for period regulation or other unrelated issues, and if you try to get your uterus/ovaries removed, even for medical reasons, doctors will fight you tooth and nail. You’re just not worth the time and energy it’d take to identify the fetus is legitimately dead and then do the procedure, so go give birth to the rotting thing on your own.
Not Farla, but I think it basically comes from the assumption that the kind of pregnancies that get aborted come from non-respectable sex (sex outside of marriage, people who can’t afford kids having sex, people who outright don’t want kids having sex…). If you’re well off and married and want kids and you get knocked up, well… you’re probably not going to be having an abortion, are you? So in this model, abortions are a way to avoid the consequences for bad behavior, and if you want the behavior you don’t like to continue having consequences marking it as bad, then you’re not going to want to give people extra options for getting out of trouble.
(I’m pro-choice, likely obviously.)
I think that for some pro-lifers, it’s more one or the other, and many pro-lifers do believe that the continued existence of a fetus is morally equivalent to the life of a child without any moral shaming involved, but the movement itself definitely has some of both. If fetus = person without any moral shaming, then it wouldn’t be so hard to get an abortion when the pregnancy is a serious health risk to you. That’s not morally consistent with general ethical positions around similar issues, such as the separation of conjoined twins – it’s generally considered ethical to perform a separation surgery that will necessarily kill one twin, if the other twin will die without such a surgery and take their sibling down with them. If it’s really just about the value of life, then this shouldn’t be controversial, but in real life it absolutely is.
Not sure Neal Shusterman himself has put a lot of thought into the issue of abortion, though. I read one of his books when I was in high school, and it was basically a sequence of gloriously fucked up ways for carnival rides to kill people, with pasted on morals about personal growth and self-acceptance. It didn’t seem to me like he wanted to write about personal growth and self-acceptance as much as it seemed like there had to be a justification for writing about fucked up ways for carnival rides to kill people. I would not be surprised one bit if he started with the Roland scene from the first book and worked backwards from that to paste on his stupid opinions about abortion.
Not Farla, but I think it basically comes from the assumption that the kind of pregnancies that get aborted come from non-respectable sex (sex outside of marriage, people who can’t afford kids or don’t want them having sex at all).
Jesus Christ, it’s right there in The Good Book not to throw stones for dumb shit like that.
Like, I would hope most people get the whole medical thing enough to spare women from pregnancies they physically can’t handle.
If you’re well off and married and want kids and you get knocked up, well… you’re probably not going to be having an abortion, are you?
So it’s just another case of well-off, married people controlling the lives of everyone else. Got it.
Jesus Christ, it’s right there in The Good Book not to throw stones for dumb shit like that.
The Good Book also says you should keep state and church separate and also pay your damn taxes, but this hasn’t stopped certain christians from arguing the opposite.
The Good Book also advocates abortion.
Granted, the way it does it is even more obviously about punishing women than the pro-life movement. Specifically, it states that a pregnant woman suspected of conceiving the child from someone else than her husband should have her head shaved, brought before the elders and made to drink some kind of concoction which is supposed to be harmless should she be faithful, but if she did cheat, it would make her uterus drop, baby and all.
The Good Book is fucked up and really should not be treated as literal guide on what to do, regardless of your faith or lack thereof.
Jesus Christ, it’s right there in The Good Book not to throw stones for dumb shit like that.
It’s also in the book (Exodus 21:22-23) that miscarriages do not count as murder and killing the woman does. The real issue comes down to the ban on nonreproductive sex of any kind, which is why this is about making sure people don’t get away with having sex that doesn’t produce offspring.
The bible does have a story where a guy is struck dead for pulling out after sex, and the context of that story (his brother died without having any children, which means his brother’s widow will have no kids to take care of her when she’s old, which means as his brother’s relative it’s his duty to give her kids, but instead he keeps having sex with her in a way that won’t get her pregnant) is so outside modern life that everyone just pulls out the part they can understand (had sex that wouldn’t produce kids) and assumes God was mad about that.
So it’s just another case of well-off, married people controlling the lives of everyone else. Got it.
Weirdly enough, no!
“health is about helping other people…. If they’re coming to you, they’re coming for your help – and not your judgment.“
That doctor lady says some good things. Like, I want to make a joke about pharmacists with god complexes, but it’s too depressing, to be honest. And fuck the government assholes who regulated the drug that way.
I recall that the biblical period for it not being considered murder extended after birth. In that case, the equation was Baby = human life * (probability of survival) . Child mortality was a very big factor in those days.
Yeah, it’s important to remember that religion and scripture tended to be very practical back then. It’s because society has been unwilling or unable to allow religion to change over the years that it seems so backwards and toxic now (with a few exceptions).
Definitely. You can see it particularly in the fact they give a set punishment for an actual death but say go to court over the miscarriage, have the guy ask for payment, then have the court decide if that’s actually fair. You can imagine people debating it before the court:
“My wife’s had three kids already, so obviously she’d have popped out the fourth just fine if you hadn’t shoved her! Therefore I should get SO MUCH MONEY.”
“Your wife has also had seven miscarriages without any shoving! Statistically, that one was probably a goner regardless! owe you PRACTICALLY NOTHING!”
“AH-HA, but you fail to consider that six of those seven miscarriages were after no more than four months of pregnancy, and she was currently on her fifth month…”
Ah, people. We really are the same throughout the ages!
Mm, the struggle of settlement negotiation. As a former worker’s comp lien resolution ‘specialist’, I have been there.
I’m not sure if practical is the right word. The standard is “stuff that doesn’t kill everyone” which includes superstitions or whatever passes for handling internal affairs.
To be fair, wouln’t what we consider to be superstitions be practical if you truly believed that if you didn’t leave a mixture of blood, mead and grains for the spirits you would be plagued with bad luck of the “I lost all my crops” kind?
A lot of superstitions do have practical value mixed in, though – there’s actually so many reasons why eating pork in their environment should be avoided that it’s hard to figure out where exactly the prohibition came from. And you can see the concept of “legal contract” wound all though the stuff. They understood agreements between people and were desperately trying to force that onto the general unpredictability of the world. Sure, they were often mistaken, but it’s reasonable to try.
“So yeah, that’s where that plot is going and not Hunger Games: Unwind Edition.”
Aww.
Can we at least have Clockwork Orange and murdering kids with songs to make a point?
I just still can’t believe that after 22 chapters there’s still no plot. The book could start here and we would barely have missed anything.
Zero plot seems like a theme in the book reviewed here, especially when it comes to YA.
And, really, we could have had a story about mad scientists hurling body parts at each other, I feel incredibly cheated here.
Seriously, where is my story of mad scientists running an Olympics/MMA tournament using humans created entirely from other humans?
Will this do? (Warning: attempted rape, minor gore)
I mean, the movie is crap, but it’s still better than this novel.
Personally, though, I’m more of a fan of the classics: