So I read the Maze Runner series by James Dashner, who hereafter I will not refer to as dipshit only because ad hominem attacks are only worthy when they're executed with style. And he doesn't deserve the effort. If you don't have the time for a 1400 word rant, I'll just cut to the chase: don't read these books.
Note; if one can spoil a flyblown pig, then yes, there are spoilers below,
It's badly written, badly plotted, badly characterized, ultimately pointless, and worse, is a fucking Mormon parable. You read me right. It's the dystopian sci-fi flavour of Stephanie Meyer's pabulum, my friends: it's Twilight, for boys.
I was originally interested in the series because I read The House of Stairs as an impressionable youth. One of the scariest books one can read as a teen, I think, because of its basic premise of recasting the realities of adult life into an unknowable, unfathomable realm where you're forced to deal with people you don't know and can't trust, and where the rules are essentially unknown unless you break them. And then you begin to be warped and twisted by your survival instincts. How far can a person be manipulated to make them conform to expectations before they shatter, or rebel? A lot of who I am and my views on societies and group dynamics were shaped by that book. And I know I'm not alone.
So I was hoping Dashner might explore some of those same psychological themes in greater detail, and provide some interesting context around the characters and interactions and society that might make such a thing work. That's not what I got.
These books are so bad that I could probably write a full length "NaNoCriMo" about them, but as I do value my time I'll settle for three major points.
The characters are shit. Each character is crayon sketched from a pool of tired YA archetypes. Thomas, the protaganist whose shoulder we surf throughout the series, veers back and forth between heroic to idiotic precisely as the plot requires; he has essentialy no agency and no consistency -- except for his doubt (you see what I did there; except it's not what I did, the author did it, that's the way it's written).
There are a bunch of other boys who orbit around Thomas, playing one role or another, almost interchangably. I say almost, because the rules of YA ensemble fiction do require each group to have weak sidekick, a bully, a fighter and a reluctant leader to go along with the protagonist, but aside from the archetype defining beats in the plot that allow you to remember names, the characters are almost interchangable.
Dystopian YA ensemble fiction also requires a bunch of supporting characters who on one page add comic releif, the next page add dialogue colour, and on the following page bleed out messily. One can do this with style and panache, giving each character their own life and agency, then snuffing them out at intervals to give the reader an elevated sense of horror, or one can just dispose of them as needed in quite a matter-of-fact fashion and then write a few words about the protagonists's elevating sense of horror. Guess which we get.
And then there are the girls. Well, in book one, there's one girl. She gravitates towards the protagonist, as one might expect, and while nothing ever happens on the page, nothing ever really happens off it either. There might be a chaste kiss. But she's treated like a commodity to be treasured by the boys or manipulated by the world's arbiters in order to make the boys do what they're told. And also as another reason to add still more snarky and chafing dialogue. (Which was obnoxious to a ridiculous degree.)
Later in book two we discover there's a gender-swapped version of the main "experiment" where there are lots of girls and one boy, and while the group does encounter these girls enmasse, and there is a brief conflict set up to test Thomas yet again, it is revealed that their experiment was easier, and while there are reportedly more of them, none of their stories are told except in faint fragments.
Another girl is introduced midway through book two, and the instant rivalry that crops up between the two of them with the protagonist in the middle is as clumsily handled as it is needless. Actually, I'm thankful that there's so few female characters in the trilogy -- they are written so badly that if there had been more than a handful of scenes I probably would have given up on it. Okay, I guess that would actually have been good.
The setting is shit. The author has clearly invested heavily in a highly leveraged position in a deus ex-machina factory. The world makes no sense. Here, let me try to explain it.
There was a huge solar flare that fucked up the sun's temperature that ultimately rendered the tropical regions of the planet a desert wasteland. Second degree sunburn in minutes, we're told. We're not told about the conditions of the rest of the world. Except that Denver is apparently still habitable, and sunburn is never mentioned again.
This catastrophe caused the release of a weaponized airborne virus that causes people to gradually lose their critical thinking skills and go mad. Nevermind that such virus activity is implausible, the suggestion that a virus like that might be a useful weapon and thus might be developed is absurd. One doesn't develop a bioweapon that cannot be trivially countered by the "good guys" side. Oh, and some very small fraction of people are immune.
All of the world's governments have come together to create an organization to come up with a cure for this virus. Although instead of pursuing a biological method (Why? Handwave), they're trying to come up with a psychological one. Thus the need to put kids through extended psychological testing.
So I'm to understand that a world that has technology for teleportation, telepathy, remote mind control, instant infection healing and much more, could not come up with a biological cure for an implausible weaponised virus.
And the organization is, naturally, given an infinite budget and is run without oversight by a bunch of seat-of-their-pants assholes very much on the "ends justify the means" range of the scale. While the rest of the world goes to hell, with "infected" citizens shipped off to concentration camps where they can slowly go mad, guarded by those who are immune, and cities gradually emptying out and then in watershed infections converted into hotzones.
The setting blows past seriously? and Really? and lands squarely inYGBFKM territory.
The plot is shit. Probably the worst indictment I can make is that nothing that happens in the books matters. None of the actions of the protagonists or the antagonists has any ultimate relevance to the setting at all. You read above that there are a small percentage of people who are immune to the virus. You would then correctly guess that one solution to the problem of a virus that wipes out humanity would be to get those folks together and allow them to breed. Which would happen anyway. Because that's what biological organisms do. They survive.
And in the last two pages of the third book, our protagonist, with his designated female companion (whose rival for Thomas' affections tragically died merely one page earlier when a rock randomly fell on her, I shit you not), and a small handful of experimental subjects all of whom were immune all along, along with a couple hundred other immunes who were rounded up, teleport to a beautiful remote area on Earth to begin again.
You see, none of the experiments ultimately mean anything. None of the strife and struggling and plotting by the organization, none of the science, none of the research, none of the angry shouting and betrayal, none of it, comes to mean anything to the billions of people around the world who are infected with this absurdly implausible disease and will die. It's all just designed to test the protagonists, to see if they're worthy.
I read these over the past couple of days, at first with interest but then with some disappointment. By the end of the first book I was dubious, and as I got to the third book I was scrolling through the text almost non-stop, reading as quickly as I could, not for enjoyment but just to see if the damn story would ever go anywhere. And it didn't. And I couldn't understand why he'd written it.
And I was making coffee this morning and thinking about just how fucking pointless the series was and stopped dead when I finally put the pieces together: it is just a parable about a blessed saviour who, tested by the evils of a foul world, proves himself just, and takes a small group of breedable companions away with him to a secret place to make a new society free of the ills of the old.
And then I threw up a little in my mouth, and came upstairs to write this.
Edited to add: in the course of writing this I looked up Dasher, and it turns out he took his schooling at Brigham Young. This is my surprised face. Also apparently there's a movie out, which was financed by Temple Hill Entertainment, which also financed the Twilight movies. This is my other surprised face.
BTB at Wilmington Fringe
11/19 '14
