Review of Quarantine: The Loners by Lex Thomas

Title: Quaratine: The Loners
Series: Quarantine #1
Author: Lex Thomas (pen name for Lex Hrabe and Thomas Voorhies)
Published: 10 July 2012
Publisher: Egmont USA
Genre: YA, science fiction
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 4/10

On the first day of school at McKinley High an explosion destroys the East Wing. All the adults suddenly vomit up their lungs and die. Soldiers surround the school and gun down any student who tries to escape. They seal off the building, trapping everyone inside. Over a month later it’s explained that the students are all infected with a virus that thrives only in the bodies of pubescent teenagers, making them instantly fatal to any child or adult they approach. Students will only be allowed to leave the school once they’ve passed through puberty and the virus leaves their bodies, in which case they have to get out quickly to avoid a swift and horrible death.

By this point the students have already divided into gangs based on American-style social cliques – Varsity (jocks), Pretty Ones, Geeks, Sluts, Nerds, Freaks and Skaters. Gangs protect their members and trade services and supplies. They also have a better chance of getting supplies when the students fight over the food drop that is delivered every two weeks. Life at McKinley is brutal, and it’s worse if you don’t have a gang, like David Thorpe and his younger brother Will. David used to be a popular jock but over the past few months he’s withdrawn from his social circle. He’s also made an enemy out of Sam Howard, the vengeful, violent leader of Varsity. David beat Sam up for stealing his girlfriend Hilary, so now Sam hates him. No gang is willing to protect David against the power of Varsity, so for over a year he concentrates on keeping his head down and doing what he must so that he and his brother can survive. But chaos erupts when David saves a beautiful girl from being raped, and accidently kills the Varsity member who attacks her.

Varsity will kill David if they get their hands on him, and to make things worse, Will is spiralling out of control. He’s in love with Lucy, the girl David rescued, but now Lucy is attracted to David instead, who likes her but is concerned about his brother’s feelings. Obsessed with trying prove himself, Will becomes increasingly deluded and reckless while David just tries his best to keep them alive.

I got off to a very bad start with this. The first few chapters rush by in a hurried attempt to set up the plot. Imagine highlighting the most significant scenes in a novel and taking out everything in between. One moment David is talking to a teacher, then there’s an explosion, the teacher dies, kids try to escape but are trapped in the school by soldiers. All this in two or three pages. In the next chapter it’s suddenly two weeks later, then a month, the gangs form, and they get told about the virus. The next chapter begins “One year later”. It’s like the authors (Lex Thomas is a pen name for Lex Hrabe and Thomas Voorhies) were so eager to get to the main story that they wanted to get all the preceding stuff out of the way as fast as fucking possible. I love a pacey plot, but this is ridiculous.

Once the main story (a love triangle, fighting brothers, Sam wanting to murder David) gets going, the novel slows down to a more reasonable pace, but it still lacks substance. The authors just don’t give us enough information. When the virus spread and the adults died, all the students’ hair fell out. When it grows back it’s white. Why? And why do none of the students wonder about this? Frankly, I think it’s just a contrivance that the authors used so that the gangs could dye their hair different colours using stuff like powdered cooldrink and ash.

I can accept that the military tells the students very little about the virus (although this looks like author laziness too), but why do they only communicate with them once? And only after a month? If they can provide food and other supplies, they can communicate with them, try to keep them organised and control all the violence. But they don’t. Why does no one mention what happened to the students’ families? Don’t the families want to communicate? And why the hell don’t any of the students wonder if they families are ok? David and Will conclude that their father must be ok because he was out of town when the virus spread, and that’s the last we hear on the subject.

Why don’t any of the gangs band together to take down Varsity, who takes most of the food? The gangs are so hostile to each other that inter-gang friendships or relationships are unthinkable. I’m quite willing to believe that there’d be a lot of violence in this situation, but would a bunch of teenagers really be this small-minded? Are they really so easily divided by stupid social categories? And given that the gangs take almost all the food, how do all the loners survive? Later in the novel the loners actually form a gang of almost a hundred students – where the fuck were they all hiding and how did they feed themselves?

I have a lot of questions about the gangs themselves too. How are the Freaks defined? There’s nothing particularly weird about them except that they dye their hair blue with toilet cleaner. What makes the Geeks geeky? They’re the art and drama students who put on plays, host a carnival, and are led by a flamboyantly gay boy. They’re more like hipsters. Varsity lives in the gym with the Pretty Ones and they all use the pool – how do they fill it and keep it clean? The Pretty Ones all wear white clothes, which is just ludicrous in that filthy environment. They also waste their time making pointless crap to sell, like lipstick and wigs. WHY?! It’s not like they need stuff to trade anyway – they survive by prostituting themselves to the Varsity boys. The Sluts on the other hand, aren’t even defined by promiscuity; they’re just a strong all-girl group. There are students having sex all the time, and although they apparently get condoms in the food drop, I can’t believe that no one would fall pregnant.

Seriously, the authors barely even tried to make this work. Last year I read Variant by Robison Wells, another novel about teenagers trapped in a school with no real adult supervision and a society made up of gangs. That was a different situation, as the kids lived organised lives and didn’t have to fight to survive or worry about being murdered, but they had no idea why they were imprisoned. However, I couldn’t help but compare Quarantine with Variant because the latter novel was meticulously detailed, explaining exactly how and why the school functioned the way it did, what the students thought of it, and how they coped. I wasn’t plagued by a long list of how’s and why’s because the author had obviously thought about them himself and made the effort to provide answers. As a result, Variant was way more interesting than this and the world-building did a lot to get me fully invested in the story. Lex Thomas seems to treat things like world-building as random crap that’s somehow getting in their way so it gets dealt with dismissively. There’s no saving the novel from this.

The story is actually ok but often frustrating. Will has epilepsy, and feels insecure after having a seizure on the quad and wetting his pants (notably, Will only has seizures when it suits the plot). He becomes obsessed with showing off and never helps David do laundry – a service that they trade for supplies. Will becomes a total asshole after David saves Lucy, and their love triangle becomes a key aspect of the plot. Will’s convinced his brother is some kind of fraud who is stealing his girl, so he frequently undermines him, or does something stupid and dangerous to impress Lucy. Meanwhile poor David shows him endless love and tolerance, and continues to provide for him. Lucy is stupidly manipulative, leading Will on when she wants David and getting close to both as if she has no idea what effect her body and beauty has on them. It makes you want to scream sometimes.

Sam’s vendetta against David is fairly compelling, if only because I had a grim determination to see what would happen. Can David turn The Loners into a strong gang? Will David survive long enough to ‘graduate’ and leave the school? Will Varsity tire of Sam’s murderous tendencies and turn on him? Sam is a very violent, vindictive person, the kind of bland villain who is so utterly horrible he doesn’t seem like a real person. Coupled with the whole gang arrangement, this makes for a great deal of brutality. There are gruesome murders, attempted murders, beatings, and terrible accidents. The Pretty Ones essentially trade in sex, with their leader, Hilary, arranging girlfriends for the Varsity boys. Lucy’s attempted rape is the only one on the page, but the implication is that rape must be fairly common; the authors just don’t address it. Varsity actually brews the own alcohol, and the guy who tried to rape Lucy was drunk at the time.

I don’t mind that this is sordid and bloody. It makes sense in the circumstances. The problem is that the circumstances are so implausible, the world-building so very shoddy. Quarantine: The Loners fails in so many ways and the story, while decent, isn’t nearly good enough to compensate. It actually ends on a cliffhanger that sets us up for a dystopian sequel, but no thanks, I’m done with this.

Still curious? Buy Quarantine: The Loners at The Book Depository.

Review of Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Title: Reamde
Author: Neal Stephenson
Published: 20 September 2011 by Atlantic Books
Genre: Techno-thriller
Source: Review copy from publisher via Penguin Books South Africa
My Rating: 8/10

Russian mafia, Chinese hackers, Islamic jihadists, secret agents, explosions, car crashes, shootouts, sword and sorcery battles, kidnapping, bombings, murders, acts of (a) god – all these things and a ton of others are packed into Neal Stephenson’s latest novel Reamde, although at a hefty 1044 pages, it’s not like there’s any shortage of space.

It starts out with Richard Forthrast attending the annual family re-u (reunion) out on a farm in Idaho. Once an army deserter, later a marijuana smuggler, Richard is the family’s black sheep but he went straight and is now the creator and billionaire CEO of a hugely successful massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) called T’Rain (‘terrain’). On par with World of Warcraft, the key feature of T’Rain is that it caters to ‘gold farmers’ – players with a lot of time on their hands who play primarily to acquire large amounts of virtual gold in the game world, which they then sell to other players for real money. Gold farming is a billion-dollar industry, but not one that is actually facilitated by MMORPGs, so the transactions are typically underhanded. The beauty of T’Rain is that it includes a simple and efficient system for players to trade their gold for cash.

But this is also why the game is targeted by Reamde – a virus that infects players’ hard drives and encrypts all their files. The encrypted files are then ransomed for 1 000 virtual gold pieces, to be paid to a troll within the game’s vast world. Once the hackers who created the virus have accumulated epic sums of gold from other players, they can then trade it for millions of dollars, essentially using the game as a money laundering system.

This fairly geeky plot quickly spirals out into an intense techno-thriller. A complex series of often bizarre connections ensnares a large, widely varied cast of characters from around the globe, takes us to China, the Philippines and across remotes areas of the USA and Canada, and leads to a long list of fights, chases and crimes. The real world is intertwined with the virtual one as some of the conflicts play out in the T’Rain using avatars and magic. The plot explodes into multiple strands that are continually converging and separating as the story develops.

It can sound pretty crazy, especially if you give someone a detailed explanation of the plot (I won’t; it’s something you should experience for yourself), but while reading it I never doubted its plausibility for a moment. This is thanks to Stephenson’s meticulous attention to detail and his incredible skill in the art of exposition, something you’ll experience many times when reading Reamde. Whether in the middle of an action scene or a conversation, the narrative will frequently go into long, detailed infodumps on a wide variety of topics – T’Rain, guns, flight plans – any topic relevant to the story.

The Corvus edition of Reamde

This amount of exposition can be a bad thing, but Stephenson is very good at it. Not only does it make the novel more realistic, it also tends to be really interesting on a general level. I particularly enjoyed the sections about the design of T’Rain, including details about its programming, social structure, species and language. For example, the land of the game world is programmed to render the billions of years of geothermal development that you would find on an actual planet. It’s not noticeable on the surface, but beneath the virtual soil are realistic strata containing precious stones and metals (which players can mine). Whether or not readers will enjoy this kind of thing is very much a matter of personal taste, but either way you have to admit that the amount of research and general knowledge that has been poured into this novel is just staggering.

The amount of information also suits the context in which the novel is set – an age defined by electronic information and communication systems. Reamde is, of course, full of tech, some of which I assume is fictional, but not to the extent that I’m willing to call this sci fi. Many of the characters are constantly jacked into the system with phones, computers and cameras, making frequent use of social media, email, Google, Wikipedia, and T’Rain. A few, however, have rejected these technological advancements altogether, and there are occasions where the plot forces characters off the grid. In these cases, their detachment from the flow of information is keenly felt.

As you might have guessed by now, this all makes Reamde a dense read requiring your full-attention. I had little time for reading last month, and as a result Reamde turned into a month-long commitment. But don’t be dissuaded because it isn’t an easy-read – it’s still an engaging and rewarding one, so much so that I seldom had trouble keeping track of the many characters and plot strands. Admittedly, I think you’d have to be Sheldon Cooper to remember all the stuff from the infodumps, but each of the main characters’ stories was entertainingly tense and compelling.

Besides the excellent action-packed plot, humour (often of the geek variety), and enough information to make you seem smarter, the novel also has some fantastic characters. At the centre is Zula, Richard’s niece. An Eritrean refugee orphan, Zula was adopted by the Forthrasts, and is now in her 20s. Richard hires her to work on T’Rain, and as a result she gets drawn into the events sparked by the virus Reamde. From then on it’s mostly Zula who drives the plot, either through her actions or the things happen to her. Zula, quite simply, is a frickin’ awesome character. She’s smart, bold, has carbon-steel determination, and remains quick-thinking and capable in harrowing situations. She went almost immediately onto my list of favourite, kick-ass female characters who I can only dream of being like. Also on that list, incidentally, is YT from Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic Snow Crash. Clearly, Stephenson has a talent for writing amazing women, and in Reamde Zula is joined by an MI6 spy and a spunky young Chinese entrepreneur who doesn’t seem to be afraid of anything.

The male characters are equally memorable and skilfully crafted. Csongar, a Hungarian hacker, is an endearing gentle giant. Sokolov, a Russian ‘security consultant’, is an intelligent, efficient and extremely dangerous fighter who you come to know and admire. Don Donald, aka D-Squared, is a pompous professor who chooses to live in an artificially medieval environment, complete with castle, servants and having all his mail handwritten and delivered by a squire. His first attempt at playing T’Rain is hilarious. There are plenty of other great characters but, again, I think it’s best if you meet them on your own.

And you should definitely try and meet them, because this is undoubtedly a book worth reading, a book to get immersed in. Once you’ve finished, it leaves you with the weighty, satisfying sense of having experienced something epic and exciting, of having found (I think caps are needed here) A GOOD READ.

Buy Reamde at Book Depository