Suicide Game

Source: Author Website

Suicide Game by Haidji (Self-Published, 2013, 358pp.)

In the distant future, a new, hit reality show is gripping TV audiences everywhere: Suicide Game! Eight thousand contestants gather in an arena and walk out onto a raised platform hundreds of feet in the air. They slip into harnesses, and then leap off into thin air. Some of these lifelines are rigged to break, while some of them aren’t. The unlucky ones plummet to their death. The lucky survivors then get to jump again, and again, until one contestant remains. What fun!

Sound like The Hunger Games? Yeah, it kinda is, except for a few differences. It isn’t young adult literature, for one. For another, it doesn’t focus on one main character, but rather a variety of contestants and game administrators to give us an idea of their motivations for wanting to participate in this gruesome spectacle. By (attempting) to examine these motivations, the story turns a critical eye on the ridiculous popularity of reality TV shows, and the “Me” generation.

I certainly don’t blame the author at all for wanting to exorcise her anxieties about modern times, and where we might be headed. That’s primarily what the science fiction genre is for. Unfortunately, like too many self-published works, Suicide Game isn’t not so much a novel as it is a vague pencil-shading of a concept. I never felt like I was quite immersed in the world, and I never really felt like the characters evolved into their own personages. While it’s certainly a good try, I can’t really recommend it as worthy literature at the present moment.

An Interesting Twist On the Modern Health Care Crisis

Angel on the Ropes by Jill Schultz (Self-Published, 2013, 287pp.)

Angel on the Ropes takes place on Penance, a space colony orbiting Earth, and focuses on the trials and tribulations of Amandine Sand. She’s a brilliant trapeze artist who’s been with the Cristallo Circus for seventeen years. Unfortunately, she’s also a leopard, which means she was born with spot-like birthmarks all over her body—a condition that many incorrectly associate with the spread of the dreaded plaguepox virus. Although the Cristallo Circus has secretly provided a haven for its leopard performers for years, Amandine still finds herself covering up her spots with makeup whenever she goes out in public. The main opponents of leopards are the hostile Plaguellants, a futuristic kind of Ku Klux Klan obsessed with genetic “purity,” as well as the eradication of all germs and plaguepox. Opposing the Plaguellants are the Spots, militant leopards that fight back against these futuristic germaphobes, but all too often end up causing just as much mayhem as their enemies. Amandine herself is with the Seekers, an organization which embraces pacifism and tries to find a healthy medium between these two extremes. Although she is devoted to the circus, she finds herself devoting more and more time to the Seekers as political tensions rise and violence threatens to erupt throughout the entire colony.

Like all good science fiction, this story is big on ideas. I absolutely loved the idea of the colony’s health care system, which relies solely on “health casinos” to provide people with medical insurance. (If you lose too many times at the casino games, you become an indentured servant to the system!) The characters, while believable and sympathetic, could have been more developed. However, I do understand that when writing science fiction, it’s better to develop fresh, new ideas rather than focus on characters (this is one of the few times you will ever see me defending the importance of plot over characters). A interesting twist on the modern health care crisis, I’d recommend Angel on the Ropes to any lover of classical science fiction.

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A Futuristic Take on The Scarlet Letter

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan (Algonquin Books, 2011, 352pp.)

Set in a futuristic America ruled by the Religious Right, Jordan pens the tale of Hannah Payne, a young Texas woman who has an abortion and is convicted of murdering her unborn child. Inspired by Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Jordan’s novel is unique and inventive. People are no longer sent to prison, but instead are subjected to a process called “chroming” - a scientific procedure that turns the offender’s skin a specific color, depending on the crime committed. In our heroine’s case, she is dyed a bright, fire engine red. Struggling to stay one step ahead of vigilante groups like the Fist of Christ, Hannah’s journey takes her from a Christian halfway house run by hypocritical sadists, where inmates are subjected to bizarre group flagellation sessions, to various safe-houses. Hannah’s journey is one is one of anger, disillusionment, and ultimately, redemption, as she struggles to come to terms with her situation. While liberals and moderates will find When She Woke entertaining, I would not recommend it to the politically conservative, as they may find Jordan’s depiction of Christians offensive.

Sci-Fi Fans, Beware! This Book Isn’t For You!

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf, 2005, 304pp.)

Set in the late 1990s in England, Ishiguro’s novel centers on Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, three young people raised at Hailsham, a special boarding school for clones. They grow up with the knowledge that they will be allowed to live into their late twenties before they’re required to begin donating their vital organs through a series of operations. The novel reminds me of Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife in that it employs a science fiction premise (time travel as a genetic disorder), but chooses instead to focus entirely on the domestic elements of day-to-day life. Unlike the The Time Traveler’s Wife, which is by far an easier read than Ishiguro’s meandering text, the reader gets no grasp of the characters at all. The main body of the narrative consists of Kathy’s passive reminisces of her childhood and young adulthood at Hailsham, as well as her occupation as a “carer,” a sort of hospice job for the still whole clones to look after the dying ones who, as the novel puts it, are “close to completion.” The way Kathy goes through her memories in a “By the way, that reminds me of the time...” sort of manner is positively infuriating. There’s no flow to the story, which made my reading experience of plowing through this disjointed novel very frustrating.

Its use of science fiction elements is another problem. Being from a family that reveres classic science fiction (literature by authors like Asimov, Heinlein, Dick, etc. that speculates about futuristic ideas and how they would affect society), I found myself unable to take this novel seriously. You would think that such a fictional society wouldn’t be the England of today, but perhaps an England in an alternate universe where the Nazis won World War II. Naturally, having already eradicated the Jewish race and other undesirables, such a society would have no qualms whatsoever about allowing the barbarity of forced organ donation to take place. The fictional society of Never Let Me Go, however, is more or less exactly the same as the real-life England that Ishiguro himself calls home. As an author, he is too lazy to address the questions that will inevitably surface with the subject of cloning: in a society so very similar to our own, how is it that human rights groups would allow forced organ donation to go unchallenged? Besides, why clone people? If science has progressed so far that cloning people is commonplace, then why can’t they just clone organs? I understand that, strictly put, this novel is meant to be a literary one, despite its dystopian premise, but the author really has no business messing about with such a subject unless he’s prepared to fully explore it. In other words: Sci-fi fans, beware! Fans of literary fiction may like it, but this book isn’t for you!

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Vonnegut's Vision of the Future

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut (1952; Dial Press, 1999, 352pp.)

Welcome to Ilium, New York, a dystopia where machines have overtaken the usefulness of the common worker. Vonnegut follows the standard formula in his offering to the dystopian genre: the protagonist, trapped in a severely flawed society, tries to overcome his plight and ends up, more often than not, as just another casualty of the system. In this case, the hero is Dr. Paul Proteus, an engineer and one of the big wigs at Ilium Works. Education and money divide the city into the haves and the have nots, with the highest paying jobs going to those who have earned at least a master’s degree (those with less than a bachelor’s are assigned manual labor). Proteus feels stifled by the boring life of social functions and parties, and often goes slumming in the poorer parts of the city. Here, he is witness to the life of the “common people,” the undereducated second-class citizens who have lost their jobs to machines, and soon comes to empathize more with them than with his own class. When he is contacted by the infamous Ghost Shirt Society, an underground organization that seeks to overthrow the machines, he is given a chance to change the face of society itself. It’s not exactly an original idea, but it is a classic one in science fiction: what happens when man’s role in society is replaced by the very inventions he created to make his life easier? Player Piano is a timeless book about modern man’s fear of technology’s possibilities, and the universal worry that society as we know it will change beyond our recognition. This is a very funny, sarcastic vision of the future that any lover of classic science fiction is guaranteed to love.

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Defenders of the Written Word, Unite!

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (Anchor, 2001, 184pp.)

When the parents of two boyhood friends are declared class enemies by Mao’s regime, their sons are sent to a remote mountain village to be “re-educated” by the peasant class. When the boys come across a stash of contraband Western classics, they seek a different way of “re-educating” themselves, as well as their new friend, the tailor’s daughter (known only to the reader as the Little Seamstress). This intriguing premise will reel in any dedicated lover of literature, forcing them to face the painful question: what if it was a crime to read your favorite books? While the author handles his story well enough, the inevitable love triangle between the three young people is poorly developed and nearly undermines the tale’s sense of tragedy. A lovely but flawed short novel that will enthrall book-lovers and defenders of the written word everywhere.