MaddAddam and why the first book is (almost) always the best

Welcome to my series on speculative fiction! For it, I will be focusing on three different series of books, highlighting three different lessons that readers (and writers) can learn from some of the best science fiction writers in the business. Since whole series are taken into account, I won’t be focusing much on plots, but rather on what unique lesson we can learn from each series as a whole. This time we’re rather spoiler free, since this is a series I don’t want to ruin for anyone.

Oryx and Crake

MaddAddam, otherwise known as Orxy and Crake

Confession: One of my favorite TV shows is CBS’s Survivor. It wasn’t always. I am not a reality TV aficionado and I was not someone who watched the earliest seasons of the series. But when I realized that it combined three of my greatest passions - tropical locations, tight editing and people taking strategy games SUPER seriously - a new obsession was born.

But since I’m a bit of a Johnny-come-lately fan of the series, some of the discussions about it have the tendency to baffle me, particularly ones about which season was the series’ best. For a large number of people, there is no topping the first season. It was too important. Too revolutionary. It set the groundwork for all subsequent seasons and all that follow have merely been echoes of it. Holding any other season up next to it just undervalues how important and shocking the first season was.

Even if I don’t understand these arguments vis a vis Survivor, I do get where they’re coming from in relation to books. The first book of a series has a kind of magic to it. It introduces the main characters, the elements the story is governed by and, most importantly, the setting. It’s undeniably true that many people read sci-fi and fantasy for the world building. And when you’re just scratching the surface of the world, there’s a sense of a new adventure around every corner.

Consider a few examples: The Hunger Games is at its most compelling when we don’t yet know the rules of the arena and are experiencing the horror along with Katniss for the first time. The Giver is extra potent because we don’t know what the next thing Jonas reveals about his world will be. They’re very much like that first season of Survivor - startling, revolutionary, instantly memorable. And in both cases, they’re the strongest novels in their respective series.

I’ll quickly list a few more series I consider to be examples of this phenomenon: Redwall by Brian Jaques, The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner, Wicked by Gregory Maguire. Even series in contemporary settings fall victim to this. Think of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables or Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.

Now, don’t get me wrong. All of these series followed up their first books with strong material. Some people may even pick some other book as their personal favorite, but my point is that sequels in a series have to work extra hard in order to equal their starting books.

So when I say that Orxy and Crake is brilliant, but its sequel, The Year of the Flood is still better, you know just how hard Margaret Atwood worked on that second book. She beat the odds. The following is my list of rules Margaret Atwood taught me for “how to improve on a first book.”

1) What fell flat in Book 1, ditch for Book 2

In Oryx and Crake, you’re stuck looking at Atwood’s post-apocalyptic world through the eyes of a strange outcast, known as Snowman. Through introspection, Snowman reveals to the reader “how the world went wrong” and we learn that once upon a time, he was known as Jimmy, an ordinary boy born to privilege who let himself be lulled into a false sense of security, even as the world was crumbling.

I say you’re stuck with him because Jimmy isn’t an entirely pleasant person to be with. He wins your sympathy, but I don’t think I’ve ever met a reader who actually liked him. But the world and the tragedy of his life is fascinating enough that it’s still a great book.

Then The Year of the Flood starts, Jimmy is nowhere to be seen and hallelujah! Though everyone in the series is damaged and filled with shades of darkness, by The Year of the Flood, there is someone worth rooting for. When Toby enters the story, wearing a pink spa jumpsuit and carrying a shotgun, there’s such a strong sense that this is someone who deserves to survive. And in that moment, the fate of humanity feels more real. If Toby dies, what’s the hope for any other half-decent person?

And as the series shapes up to be her story, it’s pretty clear that going forward, Atwood knew to focus on the character who had the gravitas to carry the plot. Jimmy is still there. He does stuff. But since he doesn’t have Toby’s power as a character, his role is diminished.

In this particular case, the weakness was a character, but this could be true of other elements too. Leave a boring setting. Axe a metaphor that isn’t working. There’s no need to repeat the same mistakes twice.

2) But for goodness sake, don’t get rid of what DOES work!

Just as Jimmy’s story is told alternating between the present and the past, so too is The Year of the Flood. In fact, this book expands on the strange story telling devises, working in sermons and hymns around the characters' memories and real-time struggles. It’s part of what makes this series so layered and beautiful.

For me, this is one of the reasons the later books in The Thief series are a bit more hit and miss. Whalen Turner very bravely switches up her view point during the series. Sometimes it pays off. But when she got to the fourth book and, for the first time since Book 1 returned to a first person narrator, I couldn’t help feeling that first person perspective is her ace. The first and fourth books share that perspective in common, and that sharpened focus made her stories far more potent. When she wrote in third person in Books 2 and 3, the story felt flatter.

It’s a delicate balance, choosing between what should stay in a book and what needs to grow. There’s not a cookie cutter solution for every series and author, but both questions - what should change, what shouldn’t - need to be considered during the creative process.

3) Give people that “explorer” of a new world feeling all over again

Even with the improved character conflicts of The Year of the Flood, Atwood might never have topped her first book if she hadn’t found some unique ways of developing the world she’d set out in the first book. As it turns out, there is much we missed from Jimmy’s perspective. The books almost feel part of different worlds, the characters come from such different spheres. As a result, that adventurous sense of discovery that makes first books so irresistible is still on offer for Book 2.

Another series that excels at this are the Harry Potter books, the evidence for which is in the titles. There is never a book title that directly references anything that came before it in the series. Even by the time of Book 7, no one has ever heard of a “Deathly Hallow.” Rowling kept her series chugging by making sure she had something new to tell us each book.

On a smaller scale, Divergent also checks this box. In Book 1, we meet the Abnegation and Dauntless factions, with just a few scenes involving Erudite. Book 2 takes Tris through both Amity and Candor and fleshes out the rest of the Erudite section. It’s really well balanced and one of the reasons that, for me personally, Insurgent is the best of the series.

In theory, if you can do these things - rework what doesn’t ring true, play up the elements of your book that people love and give the reader more world to explore, you should be well on your way to surpassing your first book.

Just good luck doing any of this in practice!

Derived VS Derivative: In Defense of Divergent

Try saying that title ten times fast.

I went for the movie poster rather than book cover because THEO JAMES!!!

Today, I'm talking about Divergent by Veronica Roth. I'm also talking about story and influence and what makes an idea "new" vs "tired and done." This won't be the last time either, so stay tuned! Today, I'm focusing on a book that catches a lot of flack for bearing similarities to others on the market and making an argument for why it deserves the love it gets anyway.

For those who don't know Divergent, here's the quick rundown:

Beatrice Prior is a sixteen-year-old girl living in a futuristic, dystopian Chicago. She's been raised in a society where people are segregated based on what virtue they most strongly identify with, whether that virtue is courage, truthfulness, kindness etc. These segregated groups are called factions and Beatrice belongs to Abnegation, the faction that bases its identity around service. While she admires those she lives among, she also feels stifled by the high level of self-denial the Abnegation insist on.

She hopes her faction test will help her make some sense of these feelings, as her choosing ceremony is coming up and she'll have to decide whether she remains in her own faction or transfers to another one. But when her test results come up inconclusive and she is forced to confront the possibility that she doesn't belong to any one faction, her understanding of her world begins to unravel...

Okay, so there's my version of the dust-jacket blurb. It gives a decent idea of what the book is about, but there is a much shorter version of the Divergent blurb that could also be given:

Divergent is Harry Potter's Hogwarts houses recast in a gritty, Hunger Games-esque environment.

And honestly, it's not a bad description of the book either.

This is where Divergent has hit some snags and criticism. Hot on the heels of Hunger Games and featuring a story mechanic reminiscent of another recent kidlit sensation, many critics are dismissing Roth's series as derivative and phoned in. The premise isn't unique enough and the books are just copycats.

Roth clearly did derive a number of her novel's elements from Hunger Games and Harry Potter. She's been very public about the fact that Harry Potter is one of her favorite books and dystopia is greatly overshadowed by Suzanne Collins's trilogy right now. But books are more than the sum of their parts, and this is especially the case with Divergent. Just because some of her novel's landscape can be traced back to other books doesn't mean that there isn't something unique on offer in Dystopian Chicago. So here are those two most common criticisms and some arguments for why they aren't quite fair.

#1: The factions are just Hogwarts houses but darker.
This, I would argue, is one of the strengths of the books. I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, but even as a child, something about the Hogwarts houses bothered me. For instance, pretty much every villain the story saw came from one house - Slytherin. During the final battle for Hogwarts, Rowling states very clearly how many of each particular house stick around to defend the school. Courageous Gryffindors make up the largest amount, followed by hardworking Hufflepuffs. A smaller fraction of intelligent Ravenclaws stay and then, of course, ambitious Slytherin is absent because they're all evil.

If Roth did base her factions on the Hogwarts houses, she recognized that there were some problems with this clear-cut way of looking at virtue. The Dauntless Faction, for instance, value courage just like Gryffindor, but Roth's version points out that courage is only useful if it is placed in correct principles. And being gumptious and willing to jump into action when it is demanded is not a guarantee that someone is going to always know WHAT the right thing is. Dauntless is largely divided between those who value the power that comes from bravery and those that value the heroism.

Similarly, the ambition of Slytherin is in many ways at it's most dangerous when it's combined with the intelligence of Ravenclaw. Erudite Faction represents a more complicated fear - one of logic overwhelming principle. I'm not sure I entirely agree with her version of these virtues, but she does devote a lot of time to arguing her views, something I do value.

Roth's books engage the notion of a society organized by cardinal virtues more deeply than the Harry Potter books, sometimes with directly opposing points. In other words, she adds to the discussion. Whether you agree with her or Rowling, she does at least force some questions about just what drives someone to evil and what weaknesses are inherent in what we call our strengths.

#2: The plot is just another Hunger Games knock-off.
This criticism has a bit more bearing, and I can definitely see some similarities. There's something familiar about the pacing of the books and the dark, grittiness. It is a dystopia and there is a "stop the evil empire" plot and there are children put through recklessly dangerous tasks that our heroine, Tris, must "win" in a matter of speaking.

But there are some important differences, most of them coming down to a character level. Tris and Katniss are very different from each other and they confront their problems in very different ways. Katniss is constantly worried about the damage she might cause in someone's life, and so holds people at a distance, more comfortable using them for survival than receiving affection. Tris, on the other hand, actively pursues acceptance and new friendships. She wants a normal life, and incidentally, lives in a world where she's got a better chance at one.

Yes, the worlds are different too. Chicago's system might be broken, but it's no punitive dictatorship like Panem. As the novels go on, she's not even sure the answer is to end the faction system, since she can see the good and the structure that have come from it. Really, there IS no hope for Katniss within the status quo, so resisting the Capitol is an easy decision... or would be if Katniss was good at making moral decisions. Another key Katniss/Tris difference. Tris is much more idealistic and much more in control of her own destiny.

In fact, if you're looking for the king of Hunger Games knock-offs, I would say you don't need to look any further than Catching Fire, the second book in Collins' trilogy, which is almost identical in plot to the first one. One of Divergent's greatest strengths is its second book, Insurgent, which steps away from the plot line of the first by developing the encroaching war in an interesting, detailed way. The same issues are not rehashed and Tris's relationships with other characters grow and change in ways not seen in the first book. As the story goes on, the more Divergent and the Hunger Games - ahem - diverge. And that is very satisfying. Once again, it might have started in a similar place, but Divergent adds something to the conversation of YA fiction.

Divergent isn't the only YA book that gets accused of being derivative. As paranormal romance and dystopian sci-fi have ran their course, numerous books have come and gone that bare resemblance to one another. Now, we're even starting to see editors and lit agents mention not wanting another "sick child" or "cancer" novel because John Green's The Fault in Our Stars is too ubiquitous.

But all of these books owe their lineage to earlier stories. It's one of the outcomes of living in the world we do. There are thousands of years of stories preceding the ones currently bought and sold in your local Barnes and Noble. Hunger Games has been accused of being derivative of an earlier Japanese film, Battle Royale, but its origins can be traced to an even earlier time. Collins has stated explicitly that she was inspired by the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which youths where abandoned inside a maze with a monster and only one made it out alive. With her use of Greek and Roman names and imagery, its clear that Collins did derive much from these books, just as Divergent derives much from earlier stories. But they aren't derivative.

For me, the bench mark is the one I've stated a couple of times already - does the work of art bring something new to the conversation? Is it using the literary tropes already common in fiction in a new way? Is it reminding us of another way of thinking about a topic, one relevant to the way the world is today? If you can answer "yes" to any of these questions, then I would argue the book is derived, not derivative.

So what then if you can't? What if a book adds nothing to the discussion? Or what if an element of the story adds nothing to where it is borrowed from? Well, stay tuned, folks. As mentioned, there's more to come.