What if the world continues on an artificial trajectory until there’s nothing left worth living for?
This dystopian novel is relatively quiet and thoughtful, but I was completely invested in the story and sped through in just a few days. I love the articles and resources that Peco and Ruth Gaskovski offer on Substack, so when I discovered Peco’s novel, I instantly knew I wanted to read it.
The worldbuilding here is so, so good and eerily believable. We’re in North America 300+ years in the future. The vast city of Lantua is a technologically advanced, progressive place where anything goes—that is, anything promoting self-centeredness and dependence on the state. Things like family and religion and privacy are acceptable only when controlled by the government. Couples, married or not, may have one child that is birthed in a bio bag. Body births are icky and illegal. Religion is okay as long as people don’t take it too seriously and it doesn’t usurp the almighty gods of self, safety, and state. Everyone is equal, except they’re not. The society is divided into echelons, and people move up or down depending on how well they follow the rules. Step out of line, and you may get demoted to a lower rung, where you don’t have access to the fine things enjoyed by the upper-echers. In Orwellian tradition, Big Brother is always watching, via “eyes” and drones—cameras and microphones everywhere. Don’t stress, though, they’re just here to help and keep you safe, after all.
Oh my. Can you see it?
The Benedites live in the Territories. They follow the old ways. They farm and raise their own children and go to church and worship Jesus. They, too, can be rigid and exacting. The Lantuan state sterilizes the majority of the Benedites so they don’t have too many kids and outnumber the Lantuans. (Phaoroh, anyone?) The Bennies hate forced sterilization and have managed to revolt and resist from time to time, but rumor has it that they are staging a larger uprising.
This is the backdrop. I don’t much want to comment on the characters or plot because it was SUCH a pleasure to read this book blind—without knowing a shred of what was going to happen.
Just the other day, I read this article about fertility by Peco, and it was such an enrichment to my reading of his novel. Great timing.
This book isn’t as high on action and thrills as you might expect. It doesn’t lean heavily into sci-fi, although I’d classify it as sci-fi dystopian. Instead, it asks those looming, moral questions and doesn’t apologize for it. Those of you who know your Bible will be rewarded with allusions and parallels. Those of you who know Latin (not me!) will need no translator for Bennie slang.
I had the itch to read sci-fi earlier this month, and so I thought, “Hey, the Expanse was pretty popular, and I’ve never read anything by these authors before, so why not start with book one in their new series?”
I made it halfway through in order to give the book a chance, but then I decided to call it quits. I may go back and listen to the rest at some point, but the first half wasn’t compelling.
The premise reminded me of the story of Daniel in the Bible (not exactly, but kinda). A powerful and power-hungry galactic civilization conquers a smaller planet (not Earth) that’s populated by humans, and they only let the cream of the crop survive. They bring these people into their regime, and the humans destroy the enemy from within. It sounded good!
I think the primary reason I wasn’t engaged is because I wasn’t crazy about any of the characters except maybe Dafyd. There were so many I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to care about most. I couldn’t visualize them, and I kept confusing them at first because they didn’t have enough flavor to distinguish themselves from each other. When characters are good, I can tolerate a blah plot, but I didn’t connect with any of them here.
Also, I didn’t connect with the enemy race, the Carryx. They are loathsome, insectile creatures who don’t understand humans. They deal with their newly captured subjects via proxies that can communicate with them, sort of. It would’ve been more engaging if the enemy wasn’t so hard to understand.
Another thing. I listened on audio, and the narrator wasn’t my favorite. I read the first chapter in print before I switched to audio, and I did enjoy that first chapter. It’s possible that the narration just wasn’t my cup of tea, and that could’ve colored my experience.
This middle-grade fantasy feels a lot like The Giver (one of my all-time favorites). Our 12-year-old protagonist, Aster Temple, lives in a tightly controlled and enclosed community called Hargrove, where people live in fear of getting caught. Doing what? Dreaming.
In Aster’s world, having dreams is a crime that gets you banished. Aster’s dad is an inspector who arrests and banishes dreamers through the Red Door, a magical portal around which the settlement is built. And Aster is a dreamer.
There you’ve got the premise.
I loved Aster’s emotional progression over the course of the novel. She starts as a pretender—it’s how she survives. She pretends to be confident and innocent, two things she isn’t. Inside, she’s weak and ready to do anything to save herself from discovery, from banishment, and from harm. She ends the novel willing to sacrifice her own safety to help others. She discovers peace and humility.
This is a refreshing take on the super-kid trope. I didn’t get the impression that Aster reaches deep within herself to find the strength to vanquish her foe. She does it because she is thinking more about others than herself. This is one of the book’s great strengths.
There are a few things that I wish were more fleshed out: I wish the book dove deeper into why dreamers are persecuted. I wish we knew where the Red Door came from. What’s the logic behind what’s behind the Red Door? (Yes, you DO find out!)
Overall, this is a great book for the younger side of the middle-grade age spread. Kids who aren’t quite ready for The Giver.
This is my first time reading Adam Roberts. I knew upfront that this is a novella and not a full novel, but I found myself wishing that it WAS. The premise is tight-packed—a hitman takes the job of kidnapping a girl on Mars and returning her to her mother on Earth. Bit by bit, Roberts reveals more, but I wish it had been developed into a full novel. I wanted to know more about Hi’s backstory, and I wasn’t sure why the novella ended the way it did.
Hi is the hitman. (How does his name relate to the word “High” as in the title? Welp, it’s the title cut in half…not sure what that means.) A wealthy NYC woman hires Hi to extract her daughter from her ex-husband’s lavish home-compound on Mars. Hi takes the job, but he’s got his own motives for doing so (not purely monetary). Probably shouldn’t give any more away.
In short order, we get a sense of this vast future world and how it works on a solar-system-level. Lots of neat techy gadgets. I wanted more.
I wanted more character. Hi is like a machine, but I wanted to know WHY he was this way. The rest of the characters have strong flaws and motivations, and I wanted more from that—I wanted them to intersect and clash.
The voice…it’s been a long time since I’ve read something written in such a nontraditional style, using second person and direct addresses. Who is this narrator?
Overall, this was intriguing for me, someone who isn’t sci-fi savvy at all.
Content warnings: There was a smattering of foul language, PG-13 violence, and non-graphic sex. Not what I’d call clean, but also not gross.
