Divergent (Roth)
May. 17th, 2011 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn3/5. This was a fast dystopian-spunky-female-lead YA read (of course from my sister) -- that is to say, don't expect lyrical prose or deep philosophical discussions, but it was a page-turner and I enjoyed it. The basic plot is that the 16-year-olds get sorted tested into Houses factions that embody traits like courage and friendship, at which point they have to fight an evil overlord with no nose prove themselves through an initiation process. It's actually pretty entertaining, though sometimes a little anvilicious on the "OMG The System Is Corrupt" messages, and even more eyebrow-raising on the class-consciousness (apparently, if you fail to prove yourself during the initiation process, you are factionless and your career prospects are limited to things like construction workers and fabric makers (and presumably farmers -- no clue who grew the food-- and probably engineers too), the horror!! Still, since it's a trilogy -- what YA book isn't -- maybe this will be addressed in the future).
I suppose I've been scarred by my formative adolescent experiences with fantasy and science fiction, but anyway, as a result I am a lot more forgiving of my YA fantasy than my YA SF. As a kid, my SF reading included, let me see, Asimov and Orson Scott Card and Le Guin and so on -- a lot of classic hard SF people. I mean, all these writers had their problems (boy howdy does Asimov look dated today), but they all subscribed to the hard SF belief that SF writers should make at least some token effort towards worldbuilding and extrapolation. Dune has (IMO) cardboard characters and laughable dialogue, but it has a quite interesting ecological system that clearly took some thought.
Fantasy, on the other hand... I ingested a lot of, let's say, wildly varying stuff when I was a kid, ranging from Tolkien and Susan Cooper and C.S. Lewis to some of the more unfortunate works of Mercedes Lackey, David Eddings, and Piers Anthony. (It's a bit of a wrench for me to admit the last in public, but yes.) And these works, even the best of them, quite frequently paid no attention to any sort of working logic as to how the world was put together. Tolkien spent a lot of time working on Middle-Earth, but you know, he was a historian and a linguist, so while the languages are minutely detailed, the economic and ecological and political realities... not so much. His imitators are even worse, not even having the language and history stuff. (By the way, Diana Wynne Jones skewered these proclivities in her really excellent Tough Guide to Fantasyland, where (among other things) she postulates that the Horse Nomads of Fantasyland must be raising vegetable-based horses, because otherwise the ecology and economy makes no sense.)
I suppose it's a result of this early exposure that I seem to have grown up with a much higher threshold for my SF than for my fantasy. Fantasy can get away with just about anything, and I may notice it when I've put down the book, or I may not, and even if I do I'll probably just shrug my shoulders. Harry Potter is a veritable minefield of stuff that is inconsistent or problematic, and I still love those books. But SF... if I can sense that you haven't put time into doing your little worldbuilding or extrapolation... I will turn up my nose at you and I will be much less willing to listen to anything else you have to say. For example, I love Diane Duane's Wizard books, even the ones where it's clear she knows zip about computers, but I had issues with Omnitopia Dawn.
This is to say that Divergent would have worked much better for me as a fantasy book. It would have been really easy to tweak it -- make the testing process depend on magic instead of technology, same with the initiation process (the only place it really depends on being based on our world, I think, is in using a couple of Boston landmarks, and that's easily changed). Because the core idea of dividing people up into factions like the Harry Potter House system -- it just doesn't make sense to me as something that could be reasonably extrapolated from current-day US. For a SF book, that really hampers my enjoyment. But for a fantasy book, I'd totally buy it. And I wouldn't keep wondering who was growing the food. ...Maybe this is just me, though.
I suppose I've been scarred by my formative adolescent experiences with fantasy and science fiction, but anyway, as a result I am a lot more forgiving of my YA fantasy than my YA SF. As a kid, my SF reading included, let me see, Asimov and Orson Scott Card and Le Guin and so on -- a lot of classic hard SF people. I mean, all these writers had their problems (boy howdy does Asimov look dated today), but they all subscribed to the hard SF belief that SF writers should make at least some token effort towards worldbuilding and extrapolation. Dune has (IMO) cardboard characters and laughable dialogue, but it has a quite interesting ecological system that clearly took some thought.
Fantasy, on the other hand... I ingested a lot of, let's say, wildly varying stuff when I was a kid, ranging from Tolkien and Susan Cooper and C.S. Lewis to some of the more unfortunate works of Mercedes Lackey, David Eddings, and Piers Anthony. (It's a bit of a wrench for me to admit the last in public, but yes.) And these works, even the best of them, quite frequently paid no attention to any sort of working logic as to how the world was put together. Tolkien spent a lot of time working on Middle-Earth, but you know, he was a historian and a linguist, so while the languages are minutely detailed, the economic and ecological and political realities... not so much. His imitators are even worse, not even having the language and history stuff. (By the way, Diana Wynne Jones skewered these proclivities in her really excellent Tough Guide to Fantasyland, where (among other things) she postulates that the Horse Nomads of Fantasyland must be raising vegetable-based horses, because otherwise the ecology and economy makes no sense.)
I suppose it's a result of this early exposure that I seem to have grown up with a much higher threshold for my SF than for my fantasy. Fantasy can get away with just about anything, and I may notice it when I've put down the book, or I may not, and even if I do I'll probably just shrug my shoulders. Harry Potter is a veritable minefield of stuff that is inconsistent or problematic, and I still love those books. But SF... if I can sense that you haven't put time into doing your little worldbuilding or extrapolation... I will turn up my nose at you and I will be much less willing to listen to anything else you have to say. For example, I love Diane Duane's Wizard books, even the ones where it's clear she knows zip about computers, but I had issues with Omnitopia Dawn.
This is to say that Divergent would have worked much better for me as a fantasy book. It would have been really easy to tweak it -- make the testing process depend on magic instead of technology, same with the initiation process (the only place it really depends on being based on our world, I think, is in using a couple of Boston landmarks, and that's easily changed). Because the core idea of dividing people up into factions like the Harry Potter House system -- it just doesn't make sense to me as something that could be reasonably extrapolated from current-day US. For a SF book, that really hampers my enjoyment. But for a fantasy book, I'd totally buy it. And I wouldn't keep wondering who was growing the food. ...Maybe this is just me, though.
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no subject
Date: 2011-05-18 04:07 am (UTC)Ha, haven't we all. So much of the older science fiction I read as a teen was so very dated I parsed it almost like fantasy, a fully divergent secondary world rather than forward-looking. (I, Robot and 2001 fly to mind as examples of this.)
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland survived the transcontinental call. It's been a decade; does it need an update for the Harry Potter generation?
no subject
Date: 2011-05-19 02:41 am (UTC)Well, I dunno, I think the Tough Guide is applicable to Harry Potter too. Though judging by my recent experiences with my sister's YA dystopia, you could make another book on YA dystopias alone... seriously, with very few exceptions they're all Spunky But Sensitive Heroine who Discovers Her Utopia Is Really a Dystopia While Finding True Love.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-19 05:25 am (UTC)Maybe. Or it's a matter of how we parsed stories in general; I look for some kind of internal logic even from my fantasy novels.
Do you know, Utopia = Dystopia sounds weirdly like Tanith Lee's Biting the Sun: teenager discovers unhappiness in a post-scarcity environment. (That's not a recommendation.) Have you been watching the HBO Game of Thrones adaptation? Tough Guide seemed applicable to the novels; I wonder if it's also relevant to the miniseries.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-20 02:20 am (UTC)I've heard the miniseries does a pretty good job of staying more-or-less true to the action in Thrones -- I kind of want to watch it now. Though I dislike all the characters enough that I don't want to reread first, so that might be kind of interested.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-26 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-26 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-26 05:50 pm (UTC)Because those books just seem improbable, don't they? Improbable to be written, improbable to be published, improbable to end up in the hands of a kid in a small town in the Deep South...
...improbable to be (re)read by a real live adult.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-27 06:47 pm (UTC)When I re-read them (sort-of-kind-of), it was when I was trying out a book rental service that I think had a lot of books donated to them, which makes a little more sense -- I can totally see these books ending up on a lot of "donate" piles.