Engine Summer

Man, the people who made the movie Cube owe Sleator royalties.

In this young adult novel from 1974, several orphaned sixteen-year-olds are dumped into a seemingly endless space containing flight after flight of interconnected stairways, something of an Escher-scape. There's a toilet, which also provides drinking water, and a machine which dispenses food... if they're willing to follow the rules the machine tries to impose on them.

I honestly don't know whether I should spoiler-cut for this book or not, because it is more than thirty years old and even the book's dedication makes it pretty obvious what is actually going on. But I guess discretion is the better part of valor?

For those of you who don't want to look under the spoiler-cut, the one-sentence summary is: clunky, the opposite of subtle, makes no damn sense in several major ways, but is still very readable, even if you sit there afterwards shaking your head sadly and sighing.

Okay, so they're being classically conditioned. But there are several things that still don't make any sense to me-- they find the machine that gives them food, and then they make no effort whatsoever to: store up food for future use; hunt around to see whether that machine is the only one; use any method to get between platforms other than the staircases; create containers to carry water, etc., etc., etc. In short, they really do not interact with their environment in most of the standard human ways. In part this is explained by the fact that the world outside the staircase area is a dystopia and they have all been brought up without much in the way of education or resources, but one of them is represented as a self-reliant juvenile delinquent who has before the beginning of the book done things such as stealing a car to run away from her orphanage. The fact that even she does not explore the place, given that no one part of it is represented as creepier than the rest, is an example of the way the book is loading its dice-- not only does the environment have to be terrible, but the people have to be less complex than real people for the author to feel that his conditioning model is believable. In actuality, it could have been a genuinely frightening book simply by using the kinds of things about human psychology demonstrated in oh, say, the Milgram experiment, or 1984. But it's not really trying to be a frightening book, it's trying to be a book that says that a person can resist any conditioning with enough willpower, that it will be difficult and terrible and nearly kill them but they can do it.

And it's because that's what the book wants to say, from before the start, because the author went in knowing that he wanted to say that, that it pulls its punches. It's true there are probably limits to the amount of violence and sex he was allowed in a YA in 1974-- hard limits, I would think. But he doesn't push them even in allusion. When without supervision in a mixed-sex environment for the first time in their lives, his teenagers kiss, and there is not even the suggestion that they do anything else, not even an elision. When it comes to violence, the author claims that they aren't capable of doing real, maiming damage to each other without substantially hurting themselves and so it isn't possible, which is patently and totally untrue. At the end, there is a point where it is very obvious a couple of characters ought to be dead, because a government that can create a thing like the stair room can also totally shoot you in the head. And this is all because a couple of the characters have to get through and be okay, or the book won't say what he wants it to. I think it would have been far better if he'd done a real thought experiment, put some different people in this space, in his head, and seen what came of it without bending any of the rules of what might have actually happened. That way, if they'd gotten through, the reader would know that the way they did that is really a way out of it. A reassurance that a dystopia can't get to your brain is weakened if the dystopia is weak.

So this is not a good book. And the lack of exploration and engagement with the environment means that the creepy-cool room of stairs does not have as much chance to shine as one would like. But this is still a fast, fun read in the implausible-survival-of-teenagers-in-peril genre, which is one I standardly enjoy. You can get a lot of pleasure out of this, if you don't expect it to be a novel; and I do like that the most badass character is female. Not a waste of time, if this is your sort of thing. In a way, I enjoyed it more than The Hunger Games, which is in a similar genre, because all the issues in this one were sitting right there on the surface so I never had to put the energy into hoping it was going somewhere awesome. Whereas The Hunger Games had just enough potential to shoot itself in the foot.

(If you want something good in the teenage-dystopia genre, of course, you want Battle Royale, but that one, being good, is genuinely pretty damn disturbing.)