Five Favorites- Speculative Fiction

Yes, here I am posting about speculative fiction, a gathering of genres I am not shy about admitting I stay away from, if you can't tell by my general lack of enthusiasm about it. I mean, the whole reason why I grouped them all together under the label of speculative fiction is because I didn't have enough material to draw it out and have a science fiction, a fantasy, a paranormal, a dystopian, and a horror list. I admit though, even with my drawing it out I am a bit embarrassed to say I had a hard time reaching five, since really only three were definites. But I need more time with my historical fiction and thriller lists, and fall is literally the only time I voluntarily bother with speculative fiction so I thought it would be nice to talk about it.

So, without further ado, here are my top five speculative fiction novels! In no particular order, of course.

1. The Unwind Dystology

  Originally, this list had a lot of nostalgic favorites such as The Girl Who Could Fly and the Percy Jackson series, but I haven't revisited those in a long time and while they both had a big impact on my life, I don't feel the need to go back to them like I did to the Unwind series. This is one of my favorite series of all time. Don't be put off by the dystopian genre classification. In fact, the first book came out three years before The Hunger Games swept onto the scene. So, what is this book about? Basically, it's set some undetermined time in the future after the Second Civil War, which was fought over abortion and resolved by the Unwind Accord, a law passed saying that 13-18 (later 17) year olds could be "unwound", retroactively aborted with all their parts used for transplants, which was a scientific discovery by then. We follow three teens, the typical YA trio of two-guys-and-a-girl, Lev Calder (he goes through like a million last name changes over the course of the series) who is a tithe which means he is going to be unwound willingly at the age of thirteen, Risa Ward, a state ward unwound because of budget cuts, and Connor Lassiter, a troubled teen whose parents unwound him as a last resort and also my biggest fictional crush. Him and Risa are also my number one OTP. There's also a lot more going on and that's just the first book. One interesting thing about the series is that the first book, Unwind, can be read as sort of a standalone, and then the other three books- UnWholly, UnSouled, and UnDivided are kind of like the actual series. It's a really great, really fucked up, and really underrated series, and has been reigning as one of my favorite books ever ever since I first read it back in middle school. It's basically my Harry Potter.

2. Marina

  Are you sick of hearing about this book yet? Well, you're probably going to hear about this book a lot more in the upcoming months. Because Marina is the current holder of my favorite book of the year, ever since reading it all the way back in March, and almost instantly became one of my favorite books of all time. This is a Spanish YA horror novel with heavy Gothic influences. It's about a boy, Oscar, who goes to this boarding school in Barcelona. As he wanders around the old part of town, he meets a man named German Blau and his daughter Marina who he becomes close to. From there, they find themselves getting involved in the dark and twisted world of Mijail Kolvenik, an inventor in postwar Barcelona. It's a very complex, complicated plot to describe, so normally I just tell people that it's basically a mix of Phantom of the Opera, Bioshock, Frankenstein, Edgar Allen Poe, and the science fiction-y parts of The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue. It's just really damn good.  

3. The Road

  Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a post apocalyptic nightmare of a book that hits you hard in the feelings. The prose is a thing of beige beauty, simplistic with almost every sentence perfectly formed. It's bleak and depressing and even horrific, but it has an almost hopeful undertone about finding something from nothing. I could tell you that this book is about a man and his son trying to not just survive but retain their humanity in a ruined world, but that's almost too simple a summary. Reading this book is an experience, one best gone through without any prior expectations. It was my favorite book of last year and has become one of my favorite books ever.

4. Six of Crows Duology

  You can tell how much I read speculative fiction because every book on this list except one I read either last year or this year. The answer for that is simple, until last year I read almost all contemporary, historical fiction, and thrillers, as well as a lot of nonfiction. I didn't start develing into fantasy until I started getting into Booktube and that made me want to try really hard to read fantasy but alas, I couldn't do it. That being said, Six of Crows was a really great discovery, one that even I was able to really get into. Mostly because I loved the Amsterdam inspired setting and the interesting blend of 16th-17th century Netherlands with late 19th-early 20th technology and clothing all in one fantasy world. This book captured me with its atmosphere and cast of characters, a group that reminded me so much of the Unwind crew. This is one of the biggest fantasy duologies out there, so I won't waste your time talking about the plot. My favorite characters were Jesper, Kaz, and Inez, I hated both Nina and Matthias, and I felt very little towards Wylan except in relation to Jesper, in which case I was all over him. I was less invested in the second book, which disappointed me in a lot of ways, but it is still a really great book duology, even for someone not into fantasy at all.

5. The Illuminae Files

  So, we had a horror novel, 2 dystopians, and a fantasy. What about science-fiction? And well paranormal, but most people including me have kind of stopped taking those books seriously since the rise and fall of the paranormal empire. So science fiction. More specifically, space science fiction. I mentally refer to it as hi-sci-fi because I like the way that sounds. I reach for those books even less than I do fantasy because I can't stand space and have little patience for endless musings on the universe. With the exception of The End from The Tsar of Love and Techno because that last story is beautiful and you know it. But yeah, the Illuminae Files. Also known as, why the hell did I like this book. It's just a ton of fun to read, that's why. It's no great literature or anything, it's just a quick, funny, and violent read, with a great first novel, a less great but still strong second book, and hopefully a third book that will round out the series nicely, even though the second book did not feel like a middle novel at all. This is another book that I think is fairly hyped up, so I also won't bore you with plot. My favorite characters are Ella, Kady, Grant, and the AI. This book was just fun escapism, and really, what else do you need from science fiction?

What are some of your favorite speculative fiction books? Have you read any of these books? What do you think about them? Leave your thoughts below!

At the Edge of the Universe by Shaun David Hutchinson Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“It's impossible to let go of the people we love. Pieces of them remain embedded inside of us like shrapnel. Every breath causes those fragments to burrow through our muscles, nearer to our hearts. And we think the pain will kill us, but it won't. Eventually, scar tissue forms around those twisted splinters like cocoons. They remain part of us, but slowly hurt less. At least, I hoped they would.”- At the Edge of the Universe, Shaun David Hutchinson

Tommy and Ozzie have been best friends since second grade, and boyfriends since eighth. They spent countless days dreaming of escaping their small town—and then Tommy vanished.

More accurately, he ceased to exist, erased from the minds and memories of everyone who knew him. Everyone except Ozzie.

Ozzie doesn’t know how to navigate life without Tommy, and soon suspects that something else is going on: that the universe is shrinking.

When Ozzie is paired up with new student Calvin on a physics project, he begins to wonder if Calvin could somehow be involved. But the more time they spend together, the harder it is for him to deny the feelings developing between them, even if he still loves Tommy.

But Ozzie knows there isn’t much time left to find Tommy–that once the door closes, it can’t be opened again. And he’s determined to keep it open as long as possible.

Believe it or not, I actually liked We Are the Ants. Sure, it was pretentious, and I'm really not into books that constantly muse about the Universe, but it was also beautifully written and felt original, and I ended up really liking both Henry and Diego and even found myself blinking away a few tears at the ending.

So with that positive prior experience with one of Hutchinson's books, I didn't expect myself to be so apprehensive picking up another. In fact, I wasn't even going to read this book at all, but I saw it in the library and walked past it like five times before deciding what the hell and adding it to my pile on the desk. 

By the way, this title/author name combination could give EverythingBeautifulIsNotRuinedbyDanielleYounge-Ullman a run for its money. I hate typing this one equally as much and I keep wanting to call it Across the Universe, which is a completely different book altogether and whenever I see it that Beatles song gets stuck in my head on a loop. Personally, I prefer long titles when the authors have a nice short name to go along with it- like The Tsar of Love and Techno or Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. But that's just me.

Fun fact before I actually begin. I started reading it when I was on vacation. I'm also petrified of flying. The flight to the place I was going on vacation to was just fine, and I was fine for the first two days until I started reading this book, and the plane crashed after Ozzie got off it. And for the rest of the vacation I couldn't read this book because I kept thinking about how the airplane I was supposed to fly home on was going to crash and I was going to die a slow and painful death. Obviously that didn't happen, but Jesus, I was doing just fine until this book. I'm not telling Hutchinson to put in a trigger warning or anything, though from what I know of his personality he probably would anyway. The only reason I'm bringing this up is to show that this book and I didn't exactly start off on the right foot. 

When I got back I started reading it again right from where I left off because I read Pride and Prejudice and also because I was actually kind of enjoying it- I just wish characters would stop bringing up that goddamn flight. I mean, it was already extremely pretentious and the theories made my head spin, but again, I read We Are the Ants and knew to expect a certain amount of that shit from his work and once I moved past it I could actually begin enjoying the book. And for the first 100 or so pages, I did. 

And after that, I started to get a bit bored and restless. I think Hutchinson bit off a bit more than he could chew. There was so much he tried to pile into this book-the word bloated comes to mind-, and all of it was to greater enhance his message, which is usually fine, but started to get really repetitive after a while. I got the gist of where he was going at the 250-300 page mark, and after that this book started to get exhausting. So much drama, so much time to angst over it constantly I wonder if Shaun David Hutchinson had all kinds of individual ideas for books and his publisher told him what the hell, just throw it all together. Lua could have been a book alone, as well as Dustin and Calvin and Warren. I wonder if this book would have been more successful if it was more of a collection of short stories, kind of like the aforementioned The Tsar of Love and Techno. It could have been billed as an interconnected collection of short stories, all taking place in the same town as We Are the Ants, and each would follow the whole universe-is-shrinking/look-forward-to-the-future message of the book, and the main story would be Ozzie and Tommy. Because, frankly, as a result of the overcrowding of stuff going on, I felt like I didn't really connect with anyone. I wanted more of Warren, more of his decision to join, and felt like his accident was tacked on and ultimately unfair to his character. I think Calvin's history of abuse and self harm could have been more developed. Hell, even Trent deserved more than what he got. 

Another issue I found with the book is that this book played way too many things way too safe. I did a lot of rolling my eyes and of coursing. Of course the father's a cheater. Of course the father's abusive. Of course coach is abusive. That's not even a spoiler, since anyone can see it coming from a mile away. Even the message wasn't anything new and original. 

All my complaints keep going back to one issue, that it was too long. I don't really know why I found this book way too long whereas We Are the Ants was roughly around the same size and yet I didn't have that issue. In this book, the prose that I loved so much in We Are the Ants started to grate on me from page 350 on, and I started fastforwarding a lot of the philosophical parts with Ozzie and Calvin because I felt like I had read that conversation again. And that writing style does not age well as it goes on. The quote I chose is a great example of the way Hutchinson writes. It's like he doesn't know when to stop. This is fine in a shorter novel of 300 pages, but when a huge novel is written like that it gets old quickly. I was beginning to wonder if Hutchinson's editor fell asleep.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against long novels. It's just that he writes, well, he writes the opposite of Markus Zusak. For those of you unfamiliar with Zusak and the way he writes, his style is more on the beige side, but he writes like a poet. His work is filled with these short, simple sentences that manage to be poignant, and, in the end, say so much more in 7 words than so many authors can say in 30. I could read a 700 page novel of his because of those gorgeous sentences. What I cannot do or do not want to do is read almost 500 pages of pure purple. Again, that quote up there actually makes me a little angry, because I don't want to put a whole fucking paragraph as a chosen quote, but none of the individual sentences work well enough on their own.

The ending was a relief, even if it did end a bit too nicely with everything working out for all the characters. I guess I can't complain too much about the ending, because Graffiti Moon had the same "everything works out for everyone" ending and I loved that book, but I actually liked all the characters in that book and it was also the perfect length- not too long, not too short, just perfect.

I thought about Graffiti Moon a lot while reading this book, probably because it was fresh in my mind. It's funny, but if you asked me at the beginning of the month I would say that those reviews should have been reversed. The glowing, emotional and impactful one should have gone to At the Edge of the Universe, whereas the pretentious, overwrought, and tiresome one should have gone to Graffiti Moon. In the end, I don't like this one nearly as much as We Are the Ants. There is an audience for this book, a wide one, and I know I am probably in the minority for it. If you do read Across the At the Edge of the Universe, I hope you like it more than I did. 

5 out of 10

Cinder by Marissa Meyer Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“Do your kind even know what love is? Can you feel anything at all, or is it just... programmed?”- Cinder, Marissa Meyer

Although eager to impress the prince, Cinder's intentions are derailed when her younger stepsister, and only human friend, is infected with the fatal plague that's been devastating Earth for a decade. Blaming Cinder for her daughter's illness, Cinder's stepmother volunteers her body for plague research, an "honor" that no one has survived.

But it doesn't take long for the scientists to discover something unusual about their new guinea pig. Something others would kill for.

The Lunar Chronicles is one of those series that it seems like most of the YA world loves. So naturally, I'm reading it for the first time now. I'm not crazy about retellings or sci-fi, so I never felt inclined to pick it up. But I'm doing this reading challenge, and one of the categories is retellings (another is sci-fi) so I figured that if I read this series I could knock both those out. 

Rightaway, I could tell that a) I was going to have to suspend my disbelief and b) how the writing was going to be. In my experience, it's rare that writing actually improves as a book goes on, while it might start out rough, usually any improvement can be accounted for me either getting used to the writing, or me realizing how the writing fits the story. The writing in this isn't the best I ever saw- I wouldn't even call it great- but it fit the story and went down easy, with some really nice descriptions that show Meyer's potential as an author. Even if the writing doesn't improve throughout the series, I would still be happy. 

But back to a. The story is fairly ridiculous and also I could tell Cinder's got a serious case of the Special Snowflake Syndrome. There are some authors who have a gift for opening scenes (Markus Zusak is one that springs to mind). Meyer isn't one of them. The opening scene sets up the story and launches us into action, not very prettily, but it gets the job done. We are introduced to Prince Kai, the love interest, Cinder's personality, the mystery of the android, and near the end, the plague. It's a lot to take in at once, with the plague part done particularly poorly. But it's a fairytale retelling ferchristssake.

But when you really think about, it's not a retelling at all. Sure, there are some aspects of the Cinderella story, like the ball and the prince and the color of the getaway vehicle and the "evil" stepfamily and, yes, her name, but other than that I don't get much of a Cinderella vibe. I mean, even if it wasn't advertised as a retelling I could pick it up, but it lacks the core message of the Cinderella story, which is that with hard work and kindness, you will be rewarded. Cinder in this novel isn't particularly kind nor hard working. Sure, she's a mechanic, but honestly it seems more like a natural gift than something achieved through her hard work. Again, she's also got a serious case of Special Snowflake Syndrome. She's attracted some handsome prince, for some reason (they don't really have much chemistry), and she's immune to the plague, as well as other revelations I won't spoil for you even if they are fairly obvious.

Characterization and worldbuilding aren't really Meyer's strong points anyway. Most of the characters aren't really that developed or even interesting. Dr Erland, who I kind of liked, functioned as an info dump/deus ex machina, Kai was the princely love interest, Queen Levana was the evil fairytale queen, etc. The world building was also shaky. Setting it in a world inspired by East Asia was a waste if Meyer didn't worldbuild at all apart from some info dumps courtesy of Dr Erland, as well as other characters. I was also unimpressed with the predictability of the plot. Nothing came as a surprise to me, because I guessed it already. And after reading Marina, I was yet again unimpressed with the attempts at body horror while Cinder was in the testing labs. The plague itself was also unimpressive. Meyer uses all this to fairly mechanically move the plot along, and I'm not entirely sure how successful it ended up being. 

All that said, this book is really readable. I could see how it got so popular, and there are some things that I really liked. I wanted to know more about this world, and about the intergalactic politics. There's a glimmer of interesting features in some of these characters, especially Queen Levana, but as of Cinder her potential is unrealized leaving behind a fairly boring evil queen. Still, I had fun reading this despite everything. 

Now, I actually like fairytales. The original versions, not necessarily the Disney ones (though I do love Disney, don't get me wrong, I have a huge weakness for both pretty things and musicals). I just like my fairytales to be dark and edgy and moralistic. Like the original version of Cinderella, with the stepmother and sisters who get their eyes plucked out by birds before dying in a cave (or something along those lines). And I will say that this book is very evoking of a fairytale. But there's a reason fairytales are typically the length of short stories, if that, and are geared towards children. The characterization in them is almost nil, as well as the worldbuilding, because it would take up too much time and space and ultimately the goal of a fairytale is not only entertain, but also teach a moral lesson of some kind (usually one rooted in religious belief) to children. Perhaps this is why fairytale retellings don't do much for me. They are often aimed towards teenagers and have the message cut out (likely because they see this as a flaw), but because they are essentially longer versions of real fairytales, don't really improve much on character (except to make the female characters "stronger" or the love interest "less flat") or world. At least they entertain, I'll give them that.

And because of that, I'll probably continue on with the series, even if I can probably guess everything that happens in it. Also, the covers of these books are really beautiful and remind me in some ways of the old Unwind covers. Like I love the whole metal bones in the shoe thing. Even the foreign covers are pretty, especially the Spanish one since a doll artist I like had one of her dolls photographed for it. I don't think this series will replace the Unwind series as my favorite YA series ever, but it should be a fun time. I'll probably get the three other books and just marathon them some weekend next month instead of dragging it out like I usually do, so look forward to that.

7 out of 10