Review: Parasite by Mira Grant

Parasite by Mira Grant (a.k.a. Seanan McGuire)

Published: Orbit, 2013

Series: Book 1 of Parasitology

Awards Nominated: Hugo Award

The Book:

“A decade in the future, humanity thrives in the absence of sickness and disease.

We owe our good health to a humble parasite - a genetically engineered tapeworm developed by the pioneering SymboGen Corporation. When implanted, the Intestinal Bodyguard worm protects us from illness, boosts our immune system - even secretes designer drugs. It's been successful beyond the scientists' wildest dreams. Now, years on, almost every human being has a SymboGen tapeworm living within them. But these parasites are getting restless. They want their own lives . . . and will do anything to get them.” ~WWend.com

This is the fourth novel I’ve read by Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire, and her fourth Hugo nomination for best novel.  I really loved Feed, but was not a huge fan of the sequels.

My Thoughts:

Parasite seemed very similar to the Newsflesh Trilogy, both in some ways I enjoyed and in other ways that I did not. The writing style is similar to the style of Newsflesh, with the same tendencies towards repetition of phrases (e.g. “the hot warm dark”, “Don’t go out alone”, etc.).  The story is also centered about a pretty neat speculative human-health idea, like the zombie virus in Newsflesh. I can see how a SymboGen worm that dispenses medicines would be very useful for people with chronic illnesses, and I’m sure it’s weight-managing abilities would help it gain popularity. While there was discussion on the genetics of the worm, I would have liked to get a little more information on how it could actually do all the things SymboGen claims.

Though the worm is pretty cool, the world situation in which the story begins seems a little improbable. Within about a decade, it seems that virtually everyone has accepted a SymboGen worm into their bodies. Even given the benefits of the worm, I think this seems very unlikely. I appreciated that the idea was somewhat addressed in a series of excerpts on advertising, titled “Selling the Unsellable”.  In addition to universal acceptance, the story relies on the idea that no one has ever skipped their 2-year replacement appointment, and that there has never been any official study of a commercial worm from the body of a consumer, outside of SymboGen. There may be good explanations for the last two, but for now, it was enough to stretch my suspension of disbelief a little bit too far.    

Some of the character types were also familiar from Newsflesh, including the cardboard villain, the mad scientist, and a quirky, hyperactive, violent, woman (similar to a minor character in Blackout).  I am not really a fan of any of these character types, and I was especially annoyed by the novel’s depiction of science/scientists. On the other hand, the heroine, Sal, had a really interesting personality and situation.  Sal woke up from a car accident with total amnesia (memories and knowledge), and spent six years trying to simultaneously fit back into her former life and establish her new identity.  In some ways she seemed to have re-adapted to her life almost unbelievably well, but she also still possessed a certain short-sighted immaturity.  Her difficulties in prioritization, making decisions, and figuring things out makes sense in terms of her overall inexperience with the world, even though it sometimes made her a pretty frustrating heroine.

Sal’s inability to put things together might have been less frustrating if so much of the novel hadn’t been built around a plot twist that was obvious to the reader from the beginning of the novel.  It takes most of the rest of the characters about half of the book to figure this twist out, but it takes Sal until the very end.  This is despite the constant, obvious clues throughout her story, as well as the fact that someone actually flat-out explains the situation to her at one point.  Aside from the revelation of the twist, I didn’t feel like there was all that much in the way of resolution at the end of the story.  This is clearly the first novel of a series, and it mostly sets up the premise and the conflicts that will likely drive the future installments.

My Rating: 2/5

Parasite kicks off a new series, one that has quite a lot of similarities to the previous Newsflesh Trilogy. It is another case of medicine gone wrong, but with parasites instead of a zombie virus.  Some of the character types are very familiar from Newsflesh, and I was really not a fan of how science and scientists were portrayed.  I found the main character’s situation intriguing, but it took her entirely too long to figure out a plot twist that was clear to readers from the first chapter.  The end of the story sets up some interesting conflict for the next novel, but, unless the second novel is also nominated for a Hugo award, I think I may sit this series out.

Review: Blackout by Mira Grant

Blackout by Mira Grant

Published : Orbit, 2012

Series : Book 3 of the Newsflesh Trilogy

There are Major Spoilers of the series ahead, so stop now if you haven't read the first two books! There is also a significant spoiler about Georgia & Shaun, which was implied in Book 2. If you're certain you know what it is already from that sentence, carry on! If not, you should probably skip this review.

The Book :

“The year was 2014. The year we cured cancer. The year we cured the common cold. And the year the dead started to walk. The year of the Rising.

The year was 2039. The world didn't end when the zombies came, it just got worse. Georgia and Shaun Mason set out on the biggest story of their generation. The uncovered the biggest conspiracy since the Rising and realized that to tell the truth, sacrifices have to be made.

Now, the year is 2041, and the investigation that began with the election of President Ryman is much bigger than anyone had assumed. With too much left to do and not much time left to do it in, the surviving staff of After the End Times must face mad scientists, zombie bears, rogue government agencies-and if there's one thing they know is true in post-zombie America, it's this: Things can always get worse.” ~WWEnd.com

This is the final installment in Mira Grant's (a.k.a. Seanan McGuire's) Newsflesh Trilogy. I loved the first book, but I was not much of a fan of the second. The final novel falls somewhere in between for me. I would strongly advise anyone interested in starting the series to not begin here, but to begin with the first novel, Feed. This is not a trilogy that is designed to be read out of order!

My Thoughts:

In Deadline, there were two major plot twists that threw me off, but I only alluded to them briefly in the review of that book. Since they continue to be a major factor in Blackout, I will now discuss them in more detail. The first was that George and Shaun had a romantic relationship, and the second was George's resurrection. It had been well established that George and Shaun were not related, though they were raised in the same household, so that was not the reason the re-definition of their relationship bothered me. My issue was that I had been really impressed by their intimate, non-romantic, brother-sister relationship, which is not something I see portrayed particularly often in novels. When I found out that it was actually a romance, I just felt disappointed. For George's resurrection, I felt that it ruined the emotional impact of the events at the end of Feed.

Having waited for roughly two years in between reading Deadline and Blackout, I feel like I am well enough over my initial disappointment to approach the final novel of the series with more of an open mind. While I'm still skeptical of the science and the motivation behind the new George, I enjoyed how the character was portrayed. The new George has some interesting identity issues, since she self-identifies as George while knowing analytically that she is not the same person. While I wasn't a huge fan of George and Shaun's romance, I did think their relationship was portrayed pretty well. I think it has mostly been George's story that has engaged me throughout the series, so the return of George, in whatever form, is welcome to me.

I was happy to see that George returned to narration, now splitting the role with Shaun. I was not partial Shaun as a narrator in Deadline, and I still prefer George's chapters in Blackout. Shaun is less abusive in Blackout, but he still seems very focused inward, on his grief about Georgia. He still talks to her in his head, and he still tends to repeat the same phrases and ideas over and over. For instance, just about every time he talks to illusion-George, he makes some comment about how he's chosen to be crazy because it's the only way to stay sane. I welcomed the return of George's more observant narration, even though she also used some repetition. A side effect of the two narrators' intense focus on each other, though, was the fact that few of the side characters seemed to get much development. I think the main focus was on the relationship between George and Shaun, though, and it is this relationship that is the most thoroughly and affectingly developed throughout the whole series.

In terms of the world-building, the focus this time around is on those who live “off the grid.” This includes Dr. Abbey and her secret lab, as well as others who choose or are forced to live outside ordinary society for one reason or another. The plot this time seemed to rely a bit too much on coincidence in a few places, and there were some digressions, but the conclusion did resolve the main questions from the previous books. I still felt the villains and their grand conspiracy was too over-the-top and illogical, but I anticipated that after the first two books. Overall, I think I can say I enjoyed the Newsflesh series for its thorough and creative depiction of a post-zombie-rising society, and for the story of Georgia Mason.

My Rating: 3/5

I enjoyed Blackout more than Deadline, but I still think that Feed is by far my favorite of the trilogy. I think that Blackout would be more enjoyable for those who appreciated the character-related plot twists of Deadline more than I did, though I think that Blackout expanded on these twists pretty well. The final novel also included the return of a narrator that I preferred over Shaun, and whose story I found more engaging. However, Blackout also contained some of the same weaknesses of the earlier books in the series, such as excessive repetition and stereotypical, over-the-top villains. I think that I enjoyed Feed more than I enjoyed the series as a whole, but I am still a fan of the detailed post-Rising world that Grant has created.

Review: Deadline by Mira Grant

Deadline by Mira Grant

Published: Orbit, 2011

Series: Book 2 of the Newsflesh Trilogy
Awards Nominated: Hugo Award and Philip K. Dick Award

Spoiler Warning: This review will contain serious spoilers of the first book in the series, Feed. I would recommend not reading this review if you haven’t read Mira Grant’s Feed.

The Book:

“Shaun Mason is a man without a mission. Not even running the news organization he built with his sister has the same urgency as it used to. Playing with dead things just doesn't seem as fun when you've lost as much as he has.

But when a CDC researcher fakes her own death and appears on his doorstep with a ravenous pack of zombies in tow, Shaun has a newfound interest in life. Because she brings news-he may have put down the monster who attacked them, but the conspiracy is far from dead.

Now, Shaun hits the road to find what truth can be found at the end of a shotgun.” ~from barnesandnoble.com

Deadline is the sequel to Feed, a Hugo-nominated novel that I’ve read and reviewed on this blog.  I loved Feed and was eager to read the rest of the series.  Unfortunately, I don’t think Deadline lived up to the expectations I had after finishing the first novel of the trilogy.

My Thoughts:

I enjoyed Grant’s thorough world building in Feed, and I continued to enjoy her attention to many aspects of post-Rising life and society in Deadline.  The second book provides even more information about the Kellis-Amberlee “zombie” virus and how it interacts with human and animal bodies.  We also get to hear a little about how people outside the US have been coping with the post-Rising world, a topic I hope is expanded upon in the final book. In addition, there are some more interesting digressions about how some mundane experiences, such as grocery shopping and air travel, have changed.  I actually read a good portion of this novel while traveling, so I had a fun time comparing post- and pre-Rising airport security protocols.  The zombies themselves, though, seem less present than in Feed. They often show up as a threat to be avoided, but there’s very little zombie-fighting action featured in the novel.   All in all, I remain impressed with Grant’s imaginative, highly regulated, post-zombie America.

One Last Spoiler Warning! If you didn’t listen to me above, and you haven’t read Feed, stop reading now!  I really don’t want to ruin Feed for you!  As you know, the cast went through a major shift by the end of Feed.  Of the three main characters from the first novel, the only survivor, Shaun, is the viewpoint character of the second book.  George is still present, in a sense, but only as a hallucination in Shaun’s head.  Even the major secondary characters from the first book, such as the former Senator Ryman and the former blogger Rick, are no longer present.  Instead, a few bloggers from the previous book step up into the limelight.  The new central team includes Maggie, the pharmaceutical heiress and new head of the Fictionals, Becks, the ex-debutante Newsie-turned-Irwin, Alaric, a quiet Newsie, and Mahir, an Indian staff member living in the UK.  They’re all interesting and quirky characters, but I felt that they weren’t as fully developed as the team in Feed. Part of that could be due to the fact that, as a narrator, George paid a lot of attention to the people around her, while Shaun was mostly just focused on himself.

That brings me to my first major complaint about the novel.  I liked Shaun as a character in Feed, and even as a viewpoint character near the end of the book. In Deadline, which I believe occurs roughly a year after the events of Feed, Shaun is really hard for me to care about. He’s incredibly absorbed in his own inner world of anguish, and has become a textbook-case physical abuser towards his employees.  Given his behavior, I found it hard to believe that he would still have both employees and ownership of the blog site. He also tends to talk constantly about his ‘craziness’, which mostly involves him having imaginary conversations with his dead sister.  For the most part, he seems to use his alleged ‘craziness’ as an excuse to not even attempt to cope with his grief or consider how his actions affect others.  For me, all of this combined to make reading the story through his mental filter an incredibly frustrating experience.   

Once the conspiracy hunting gets underway, Shaun’s voice becomes a little less grating.  However, I ended up having some serious issues with the structure and content of the plot. Shaun and his team’s actions often seem more random than purposeful, and almost all of their successes are literally handed to them by characters that conveniently show up just to dispense chunks of information.  There were also some major plot twists near the end that didn’t really feel connected to the bulk of the story. Some of them felt like they cheapened the impact of events in Feed.

In terms of content, I was disappointed that Deadline did not seem to correct Feed’s problem of clichéd, over-the-top villainy. If anything, the villains in Deadline seem even more stereotypical and mustache-twirling.  I was on board with the idea of corruption within corporations who operate with no checks on their power, but most of what is implied about the grand mysterious conspiracy seems, at this point, somewhat unrealistic and slightly ridiculous.  I’m getting the impression that some of these problems arise from Deadline being a transitional book (between Feed and next year’s finale).  From that perspective, I don’t think I can really say how I feel about many of these issues until I see how it all eventually ties together in the final volume.

My Rating: 2.5/5

I started reading Deadline with high expectations, but I don’t think that it ultimately lived up to the standard set by Feed, the initial book of the Newsflesh Trilogy.  Grant’s post-Rising world was still fascinating, and I enjoyed learning more about both the zombie virus and other aspects of society.  However, the new cast of characters didn’t seem to be as fully realized, and I found Shaun to be a much less sympathetic narrator.  I had some issues with both structure and content of the plot, which seem to arise from a bad case of ‘middle book syndrome’.  Certain plot twists do not seem to relate significantly to the rest of the story, and too many characters seem to show up solely for info-dump purposes.  Deadline also seems to continue Feed’s problem of one-dimensional, stereotypical villains, with all the absurd plots and schemes that typically entails.  With all that said, I’m still looking forward to reading the final installment, Blackout, next year. I still want to know how the story ends, and I remain hopeful that everything will eventually tie together satisfactorily.

Review: Feed by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire)

This review also appears as a guest post on WorldsWithoutEnd.com. Worlds Without End (WWEnd) is a wonderful site for fans of science fiction and fantasy literature.  It has forums, blogs containing news, reviews, and author interviews, and an extensive database with information on authors, publishers, and novels.  WWEnd follows 10 major SF/F awards, and it boasts many categorized lists of novels that can help introduce readers to new experiences.  Members can create their own 'virtual bookshelves', organize reading lists, and rate and review books they've read.  For these and many other reasons, I recommend WWEnd as a site not to miss for anyone with an interest in science fiction and fantasy.

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Feed by Mira Grant

Published: Orbit, 2010

Nominated: Hugo Award

The Book:

“In 2014, two experimental viruses—a genetically engineered flu strain designed by Dr. Alexander Kellis, intended to act as a cure for the common cold, and a cancer-killing strain of Marburg, known as "Marburg Amberlee"—escaped the lab and combined to form a single airborne pathogen that swept around the world in a matter of days. It cured cancer. It stopped a thousand cold and flu viruses in their tracks.

It raised the dead.

Millions died in the chaos that followed. The summer of 2014 was dubbed "The Rising," and only the lessons learned from a thousand zombie movies allowed mankind to survive. Even then, the world was changed forever. The mainstream media fell, Internet news acquired an undeniable new legitimacy, and the CDC rose to a new level of power.

Set twenty years after the Rising, the Newsflesh trilogy follows a team of bloggers, led by Georgia and Shaun Mason, as they search for the brutal truths behind the infection. Danger, deceit, and betrayal lurk around every corner, as does the hardest question of them all:

When will you rise?

When Senator Peter Ryman of Wisconsin decides to take a team of bloggers along on his run for the White House, Georgia and Shaun Mason are quick to submit their application. They, along with their friend Georgette "Buffy" M. are selected, and view this as the chance to launch their careers to a whole new level...that is, if they can survive the campaign trail.”

~MiraGrant.com

I chose to read Feed due to its recent Hugo nomination.   I admit that I set out to read it with a bit of a positive bias.  I’ve never read anything by Seanan McGuire (Mira Grant’s real name) before, but I’m a pretty big fan of zombie apocalypse stories.  I’ve watched zombie apocalypse movies, read other zombie novels, such as World War Z, and comics, and I often play zombie survival video games.  All of this may have slightly skewed my opinion of Feed, but I’m pretty sure that I would have loved it regardless.    

My Thoughts:

Rather than recounting the zombie apocalypse, Feed takes place as the first generation with no memories of a pre-Rising world comes into adulthood.  At this point, zombies are a constant, but manageable, threat.  While there’s certainly some zombie action scattered throughout the book, it’s the human characters that take center stage.  Georgia (George), Shaun and Buffy are 20-something bloggers who are the first non-traditional news media to be included in the coverage of a presidential campaign.  It’s a great opportunity for them, until things take a turn for the dangerous and they begin to uncover potentially deadly secrets.  While the basics of the mystery might be a little bit predictable, I did not feel like that significantly detracted from the draw or emotional effectiveness of the story.  The fascinating characters, complex world-building, and several unforeseen plot twists along the way more than made up for any predictability in the basic structure.

George, Shaun and Buffy intrigued me from the beginning, and I only grew to like them more as the book progressed.  As professional bloggers, they keep themselves under near-constant surveillance, and they each have a carefully cultivated public personality. George, the viewpoint character, is considered a “Newsie” blogger, who reports the news with as little bias as possible.  Her persona is sarcastic, hard-nosed, and aggressive.  Thanks to her ‘retinal-KA’ (a zombie-related eye infection), she always wears sunglasses to protect her permanently dilated eyes from light.  I empathized with her immediately over her eye problems.  As a nearsighted person, I’ve regularly had my eyes dilated, and I can attest to how annoying it is. Her adopted brother Shaun, an “Irwin”, uses his blog to provide thrills to people hiding safe in their homes.  He tries to cultivate a carefree, daredevil attitude, and constantly gets himself into exciting and dangerous situations.  Buffy is a “Fictional”, who has a fondness for writing sappy poetry. She presents herself as friendly, eccentric, and kind of flaky, but she’s also a highly skilled tech who takes care of all the electronics.  We learn more about them, and their styles of blogging, in interesting excerpts from their blog files that are inserted between the chapters.

While these public personae are the first impressions we get of George, Shaun, and Buffy, there’s much more to them than the ‘characters’ they play.  George is an uncompromising reporter, but she’s also a young woman from a troubled home life, who worries about the safety of her thrill-seeking brother.  Shaun might act like an “Irwin”, but he’s also a stickler for safety measures in field situations, and he has an unexpected temper beneath his carefree veneer.  Buffy might seem flighty, but she has depth to her that no one would expect.  Also, none of them have ever really lost anything significant as a result of the zombie uprising.  In this careful, post-Rising world, even though they regularly encounter zombies, they still have the typical youthful sense that disasters are something that happen to other people. I greatly enjoyed slowly growing to know and care about these characters over the course of Senator Ryman’s campaign trail.  Aside from the three of them, there was a multitude of minor characters, such as Senator Ryman, his wife, the latecomer blogger Rick, and other bloggers.  While they are not explored in nearly as much detail, they do enrich the world that George, Shaun, and Buffy inhabit. 

It’s not only the many characters that make the world they inhabit so satisfyingly intricate. Grant goes into great detail describing the post-Rising society, the post-Rising blogosphere, the zombie virus, and how people have changed as a result of it all.  In particular, the explanation of the zombie virus is one of the most thorough and interesting I’ve ever seen. To greatly simplify Grant’s explanation, the Kellis-Amberlee (zombie) virus has actually spread in a dormant state through the entire world.  Upon death or contact with an active virus (e.g., a zombie bite), the virus takes over the living creature, turning it into a zombie.  Not only humans are susceptible to the virus, but also animals with sufficient body mass (anything of a size equal to or greater than that of a large dog). 

Since everyone reanimates after death, it seems like the zombie virus can never be extinguished. Most people are afraid of crowds, afraid of their neighbors, and even afraid of pets.  As a result of this fear, their society is highly, almost obsessively, regulated. Most people live in high security communities, clean blood tests are constantly required when going anywhere, and the idea of burying the dead instead of burning the infectious corpse is regarded with horror.  The threat of zombies is actually pretty blatantly conflated with terrorism, making this a pretty heavy-handed reference to living in a modern-day culture of fear.  I don’t think that Grant ever stepped over the line into sermonizing, though, and she didn’t attempt to force any solutions.  Their fear is certainly shown as reasonable, and the open question is how much they should let it govern their lives.

My Rating: 5/5

Feed ranks among the best of the books I’ve read this year.  I can literally say that it made me laugh and cry, and there was never a point where I was less than intensely interested in the story.  I could tell that a lot of thought went into the construction of the zombie virus and the post-zombie-apocalypse society, and I loved reading the descriptions of both. I found the public personae and private personalities of George, Shaun, and Buffy intriguing, and I quickly found myself deeply emotionally invested in their dangerous adventure.  I think Feed definitely deserves its Hugo recognition, and I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series, Deadline, which has just come out!