Tag Archives: dystopian

Trope or Choke: Episode 7

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The challenge: write a complete story in 500 words or less following these guidelines:

Setting: Scotland Yard

Genre: Dystopian + military sci-fi

Trope: New frontier

Characters: Captain Kirk + manic pixie dream girl

POV/tense: 2nd/present

The result:

A New Frontier Awaits You

His name: Ossetian. Lieutenant in the Global Atlantic Empire’s Forces. Red hair. Muscled. Suspicious eyes. Seeing those eyes in person convinces you he is indeed a counterrevolutionary. He sits across from you in the cafe with a gesticulating Asian man not in any dossier.

How’s the coffee?

The waitress pulls you from your observation. She’s fit, hint of makeup, severe brown bob, twinkling green eyes.

Fine, you say.

Just fine? She pouts. Never seen you here before.

You glance at Ossetian. His companion stalks out. Ossetian remains.

The waitress cocks her hip. You need something sweet in your life. How about a strawberry croissant?

You debate trailing the companion. The waitress lingers with a sly smile. On me, she says.

You’ve already got a snap of the companion to feed into the Mil-FBI database. Sure.

She returns with the croissant. I’m Minka. She waits for your answer. Don’t be rude now.

Kirk, you confess.

As you leave she slides beside you and whispers something in your ear you don’t quite catch. Before you step in the rain she says clearly, come back to me.

You go back, though not for her. Ossetian meets with a revolving retinue at the cafe. Still no proof he’s been corrupted by the group that calls themselves Scotland Yard. They’ve corrupted the wetware of millions. How, though? Your enhanced interrogations produced nothing. At this frustrating rate you’ll never advance beyond captain.

Minka grows brazen. She says her shift ended. She joins you for espresso and says you really need to loosen up, Kirk. Surely the empire would want you to unwind. Then she’s in your bed whispering words that melt into nothing. As the sunrises on yet another morning together, you think maybe she’s right. Maybe there is more to life than fortifying the principles of the empire.

Ossetian stops going to the cafe. After three days you realize you miss her. You try to dismiss these unsanctioned emotions; it feels as if something’s infected your wetware. If true, you’ll be ejected from Mil-FBI. Or worse.

Midnight. Intel suggests the factory is Scotland Yard’s HQ. You lead your squad inside. You stalk empty rooms. You climb stairs. No sign of anything remotely Scotland Yard. Third floor your squad grows restless. It’s a bust, your second says. Basement, you order. You descend. Dank rooms. Darkness. A light from behind a closed door. You crack it open.

The Asian man, Ossetian’s first companion at the cafe, sits beneath a dangling bulb.

Lovely to see you again, Captain.

I don’t know you.

But we know you.

Your squad rustles behind you. One more word he’ll ruin your career. You level your weapon at him.

What a prize, he mutters. He locks eyes and tells you clearly, A new frontier awaits you.

The words strike a memory: Minka’s whispers. They worm into your wetware. You feel the corruption in real time. A cracking. A shattering. Shackles break.

Clarity, for the first time. You turn and fire. Four bodies fall.

Image by vecstock on Freepik

Read this book: Black Moon

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Have you ever had a wicked bout of insomnia? It’s near dawn and you haven’t been able to sleep, no matter what you do. The world outside your bedroom is fast asleep, but not you. And slowly, you begin to hate all these lucky sleepers as your mind jumps and skitters.

Imagine if that insomnia lasted not one night, but several days — and then endlessly. What would you do? How much of your sanity would remain?

Black MoonThis is the premise of Kenneth Calhoun’s debut novel Black Moon. An unexplained insomnia plague has struck. People are becoming sleepless zombies, losing their minds as they wander the landscape. A lucky few, however, can still sleep. Only they’re targeted by the angry hordes.

Black Moon is a new take on the zombie craze that refuses to die out. It includes several zombie tropes that we all know so well by now — the ravaged landscape, the plucky heroes targeted, the dystopian gloom. The fact that these “zombies” are still alive is a fresh twist.

This strong premise, and not the characterization or plotting, is what carries this book, and it’s unfortunate. Black Moon is a good book. It could have been a great one.

Time for the breakdown. First, the good:

— As I said, the premise is strong. It taps into a nearly universal experience. Most of us have been frustrated by not being able to fall asleep. And we have also had that spacey, drunk-like feeling of being sleep deprived. Black Moon raises an interesting question: how much of our daily life is simply a valiant effort to hold back the unconscious wildness that streaks through our minds at any given moment? Our dream worlds, like our inner monologues, are free flowing and chaotic. Which is our more natural state?

— Apocalyptic books can take one of two paths: the knowledgeable official (government, scientist, etc), who works to solve the problem, or the ordinary Joe/Jane who struggles to survive. I prefer the latter. Black Moon shifted between several characters — average people all struggling to cope. This book provided no answers, and it didn’t even try to. I appreciated that.

— At around 300 pages, Black Moon is short. It is a quick and thrilling read. And Calhoun can write quality prose.

And the not so good:

— Plotting is not one of the stronger suits of Black Moon. We shift between character viewpoints, which isn’t a problem, except when the shifts jump around, leaving the reader confused as to what happened and why. You may find yourself backtracking several times, and not in a good way. Calhoun had the room to explore several scenes more fully, and for some reason, he chose not to.

— The characters were a mixed bag. Biggs is one of the POV characters. He can sleep, and he searches for his insomniac wife, Carolyn. All the while, we get their back story as a couple. While I could relate to Biggs through his interactions with his dying world, I could not relate to the wife he described. I didn’t like her at all, and didn’t care. Several of the characters seemed like cardboard cut-outs, not flesh-and-blood people.

These drawbacks were not insignificant. Luckily, the premise is strong enough to counterbalance these flaws. Ultimately, Black Moon is a fun book. It’s a new take on the zombie craze that will keep you up at night as you race to finish it.

Read this book: The Maze Runner

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Short take: The Maze Runner, by James Dashner, is a thrill ride that succeeds despite its lack of heart.

Maze RunnerWhen I was young I devoured the Choose Your Own Adventure books. These books were a plot maze where the reader would make a decision at a crucial plot point, and then be directed to a certain page to continue the story. Some decisions would lead to a dead end — end of story — while others would keep you going. All the books were exciting, plot-driven page turners where character (and character development) was largely irrelevant.

In many ways, The Maze Runner, another entry in the YA dystopian canon, reminds me of the Choose Your Own Adventure books. It’s an action-packed story with characters who might as well be blank.

The story: Thomas wakes up in an elevator, with no firm memories, that takes him to a place populated with tough-talking teenage boys. Thomas soon discovers that he’s trapped, as are all the boys. Every day the walls of their compound open, revealing mazes that the boys attempt to navigate. They’ve failed to find an escape, and are threatened by biomechanical monsters called Grievers that lurk in the maze. Thomas is determined to become a maze runner, convinced he can not only solve the maze, but also recover his lost memories.

First, the good:

–Reading The Maze Runner, the first in a series, is like being at a great amusement park. The book is a constant thrill ride that had me turning pages (flipping through my Kindle) at a lightning pace. Dashner excels at turning up the heat and keeping it going.

–Not only that, but Dashner expertly parcels out hints of what’s really going on. He gives us just enough to pique our interest the whole way through.

And the not-so-good:

–Thomas as a character is not relatable. He doesn’t have much of an inner life, largely because he can’t recall his past. Thomas has guts, but he has no heart. I felt the same about most of the other characters — group leaders Newt and Alby, maze-running expert Minho, and the mysterious lone girl Teresa. The only character who seemed three-dimensional was eager, bumbling Chuck. Dashner subtly showed us how desperate Chuck was for friendship. He did this through Chuck’s dialogue and actions. If only Dashner had done that with Thomas and the rest.

–I didn’t buy Thomas’s fledgling relationship with Teresa. Again, maybe it was the fact that both characters were amnesiacs; there wasn’t much to build on. Was Teresa included only to throw in a romantic subplot? If so, then it felt forced.

–While the story was thrilling, there were times when I wanted Dashner to slow down. There was little reflection. The Maze Runner would have benefited from a break in the action now and then.

But these complaints don’t doom the book — far from it.

The Maze Runner is just one among many YA dystopian novels, a trend which seems to never end. The ones I enjoyed the most — The Hunger Games series and Neal Shusterman’s Unwind — excelled because they focused on character. The Maze Runner shows that sometimes you can get away with relying solely on plot.