Birthmarked

I love good dystopia. I love reading fun thought experiments where something gets tweaked in the society in an interesting way--banning books, subjecting everyone to the thought police, altering human reproduction in some way--and then we see where that society goes. A good dystopia, in my mind, is one that sheds light on our current society by changing some fundamental and then putting us readers in the position of empathizing (or at least following) someone who has grown up with that fundamental.

I'm not going to list all my favorite dystopian literature, but I am going to say "Birthmarked" is getting a spot on the list. It's about a young girl, Gaia Stone, who is a midwife. As a midwife she's expected to hand over the first three babies she assists in the birthing of to the enclave--basically the walled-off upper eschelon of the society. She has no reason to question this practice. It's well-known that kids inside the enclave live lives of relative luxury, with access to education, better food, and better medicine than those outside the walls can afford. Her older brothers both went to the enclave. She, however, was scarred by and accident with hot wax when she was young and so she wasn't picked to be 'advanced.'

Shortly after she delivers her first baby to the enclave, she discovers her parents have been arrested and taken to the prison inside the enclave. She, of course, has to get them back so she sneaks in, just in time to watch the execution of a very pregnant woman. Gaia convinces the man responsible for disposing of the body that she's a relative and quickly slices open the woman's belly, saving the child but landing in prison. From there she slowly unravels the mystery of why her parents were arrested and why the enclave wants the babies in the first place.

There are a number of reasons why I love this book. First, it is a well-told story. I didn't ever want to put it down and was always anxious to pick it back up.

Second, unlike many science fiction dystopias there weren't any egregiously bad science details for me to get hung up on. This could as accurately be classified as a science fiction novel and the science in it is good. There's no magic science allowing people to control others or know things they shouldn't be able to know.

Third, human life is valued within the framework of the story. One of the things I dislike in many dystopias is that human life is considered worthless, or at least very cheap. That attitude is so thoroughly divorced from my experience as a Western person that I have a hard time accepting it. Sure, under extreme situations those of us raised in the western world would have the potential to treat (some) human lives as expendable, but not as an every-day thing. I think the suicide rates and prevalence of PTSD and other psychological disorders among our combat veterans speaks to that strongly. When you're raised with the idea that human life is sacred, living in a situation in which human life is suddenly completely expendable does serious psychological damage.

With the possible exception of the Hunger Games trilogy, that theme isn't even hinted at. It's just assumed that once society descends into chaos human life will become cheap and will forever stay cheap (Margaret Atwood, I'm looking at you). I simply don't think that's realistic. People raised with a western mindset will reassert the value of human life once some measure of stability is possible again. People are too big an investment, even if you don't educate them all that well, to just throw to the meat grinders.

Lastly, instability doesn't last all that long, certainly not decades. Humans, flexible as they are, like stability and will work--hard--to create it. I'm concurrently (sort of) reading Rob Ziegler's "Seed." It's hard to know how long the conflict in that story's been going on, but it sounds like people have been on the move, dealing with serious ecological disasters for decades. That's simply not realistic. Yes, people have been nomadic in the past, but with much smaller population densities. If we returned to a nomadic lifestyle, even if it were a sort of itinerant farming kind of lifestyle, human population would drop to the level that would be supported ecologically within a few years at most and you'd stop having mass starvation all the time. Droughts, floods, or other disasters would occasionally stomp on the remaining human population, but those events wouldn't be yearly. So, yeah, the image of starving farmers drifting zombie-like across the plains is heart-wrenching and frightening, but not realistic.

Far more realistic is the image painted by O'Brien: a smallish city, isolated, but eking out an existence based on locally available resources and the remnants of technology preserved by the (now) upper echelons of the society.

Finishing threads

My life has a lot of dangling threads in it--little unresolved conflicts or projects. We all have them in our lives, cluttering things up. I'm sure you know the ones I'm talking about: the cross stitch you picked up from Mt. Rushmore 15 years ago and haven't even finished Washington; the painting that's almost ready to hang if you can just get the foreground right; the collection of pictures of your second (or third) child's first year that's sitting in a photo album, just waiting for you to label and stick the pictures in.

In our lives they're just clutter, and in our books they're just clutter. Except, of course, when it's not just clutter, when it's texture or a red herring meant to set the reader off on the wrong track for a little while. When done right they do add to a story, but when done wrong they detract and make the writing sound amateurish.

Why am I thinking about this? I just finished a book, "The Chocolatier's wife" by Cindy Lynn Speer. I liked the book, especially the voice. The world she's created isn't a completely standard western European-based world (though it is western European in flavor). The direction she took her world-building was one I quite enjoyed.

The problem for me with the book was in the plot. While there are no specifically unresolved plot threads, there are a lot of plot threads that don't go anywhere. There are spoilers ahead, so if you're going to read the book and that'll bother you, stop reading now.

To give one example (which, to be fair, is probably the most egregious in the book) Tasmin at one point plots to help William escape from his jail cell. It's a nice little side plot that gets resolved within pages by another woman confessing to the crime for which William has been jailed. There are no consequences for Tasmin or William since they don't actually do anything. There are no consequences at all for Tasmin for she doesn't even explain to William what she's planning. It's one of those plot points that feels like it should go somewhere, and when it doesn't it's somewhat disappointing. I was happy William was freed, and the manner of it is pretty much required by the remainder of the plot, but the promise made to me when Tasmin conspired to break the law to help her betrothed escape felt unfulfilled.

I'm guessing my books will have a lot of those in the beginning as well. In fact, I know my WIP has some dangling threads right now that I'm probably not even going to resolve. They don't add anything other than texture (maybe) and confusion for my readers (definitely). Fortunately, I have good critique partners who point out the places they feel like a promise is going unfulfilled and that helps me decide if I want to flesh out the plot thread or cut it entirely.

The Sunday Philosophy Club

I've never read "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency," by Alexander McCall Smith, though I have watched a few episodes and was quite entertained by them. I imagine they're wonderful reads, though, as I thoroughly enjoyed "The Sunday Philosophy Club," another book by AMS (as I will refer to him in the future). Isabel Dalhousie is a wonderful character who was easy to fall in love with, from her musings on human nature and her philosophizing to her penchant for meddling in affairs she really aught to stay out of. What I loved most is the way her character really examines all of her actions. I know most of us don't really think that deeply (or that honestly) about our behavior, but watching Isabel go through the thought process behind her actions made them feel terribly realistic and reasonable, even when they weren't. It's not an action-packed book by any stretch of the imagination; instead it's a (for me) intense character study.

Not that I think most authors could pull off the navel-gazing half so entertainingly, but I almost wished for more of that kind of intense thoughtfulness in the books I read. I'm also inspired to throw more navel-gazing into my own work. Hey, if it's boring, I can always cut it or streamline it, and if it's interesting my characters will be lifted off the page like Isabel Dalhousie was for me.