Tag Archives: Dystopian

NaNoWriMo: Day 5 - And perhaps, a title?

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I think I’ve got a title, Niu Zeelandia. Niu from Niu Sila (Samoan for New Zealand) and Zeelandia (Nova Zeelandia - Latin). Don’t ask why I do things, it’s a working title. Also, today was worse than yesterday! But tomorrow, tomorrow will be better. I keep falling asleep while writing so who knows if the following even makes sense?

Niu Zeelandia: Day 5

Word Count: 871

“What did you say?” Glasses, who Eli really considered calling Reptile because all she could now focus on was the fact that he looked incredibly like a bespectacled Tuatara, gripped Eli’s shovel and pushed past her towards Dex.

“I said,” Dex began, the sound of hard plastic connecting with skin took Eli by surprise, as Dex doubled over, winded by the handle of her shovel thrust at his stomach by Reptile. “Fuck!” He grunted through clenched teeth.

“Didn’t your parents ever teach you manners?” Reptile seemed to find his quip hilarious, “Before they dragged them off, that is.” The urge to break the man’s face threatened to take hold of Eli’s sense and chuck it out the door, white hot rage coursed through her. The rage itself didn’t unsettle her, but rather the tinge of grief which always threatened to turn into a tidal wave of guilty shame that she felt would never ever go away. However she managed to keep her anger, and more importantly her hopelessness, in check, choosing instead to keep her eye on Rifleman, who continued to hold the gun aimed at Dex’s back.

“Greg- we have to get back, I told you couldn’t leave Lorna with the girls alone for long.” Rifleman spoke, eyes flicking from Reptile, no, Greg, to Eli to Dex before back to Greg. “Can we just grab who we came for and go?”

“Don’t be such a wet blanket John, we’re just having fun, aren’t we kids?” Once again he looked at Eli as if she was a fly to be ensnared.

“I need to get home, look grab the rifle.” John, making possibly the biggest mistake of his life extended his podgy arm out with the rifle to Greg. As Greg realised the mistake he made to quickly snatch the rifle from the larger man’s arm, his movements weren’t nearly as quick as Dex’s who grabbed the rifle and wrenched it from the man’s hand.

In what Eli could only describe as stupidity Greg lunged at Dex, the shovel clanging on the ground as he moved forward. The shovel was in her possession before she even realised she’d lunged for it; the heavy garden tool a welcome weight in her hand once again. She swung it around and aimed the flat scoop at John’s face, “I wouldn’t fricken’ move if I was you.” She advised.

“What are you kids going to do?” Greg laughed, “Kill us?”

His earlier words came to mind, it was one thing to try to hold us captive for the sake of taking any food we had or rounding us up for ‘sacrificial reason’, but it was another to make jokes about the fact that their parents had been ripped away from them for the sake of the upper classes’ survival.

She did everything she could to keep the survivor’s guilt at bay, Eli combated it every night before attempting to fall asleep. But it was more than survivor’s guilt, not the way that Dex was entitled to feel when his parents were mentioned. No, Eli’s guilt was warranted, because it was her fault her family was gone. Her fault she wasn’t able to see her mother’s face or her little twin brothers again.

“I’m trying real hard not to right now but you’re just asking for it.” Eli snapped. Dex clipped Greg on the side of the head with the barrel of the rifle, an impeccable show of self-restraint on his part. Eli wanted to smash the man’s face in with the sharp part of her shovel. Podgy John’s voice cut through and stopped her from knocking Greg’s yellowed teeth out of his ugly non-existent lipped mouth.

“Look I have a wife and kids, they’re waiting for me-” John began to plead. Eli turned to contemplate the doughy looking man, wondering what it was he did before the Incursion.

“Fuck up, John.” Greg sneered; Eli caught Dex’s gaze before walking to stand behind the thinning-haired man, kicking in his knees so he was kneeling.

“You shut your bloody face.” She looked over at Dex, “What do we do?”

“Oh now you want to listen to me?” Was Dex picking now, of all times, to bring up the fact if it weren’t for my impatience we wouldn’t be in this mess?

Meanwhile John continued to beg, “Please? We were told to keep two teenagers we saw preoccupied-” The whizzing sound of an arrow cutting through the air and sinking with deadly accuracy into the side of John’s neck cut him short, the man barely had a chance to register that he had an arrow sticking out of his neck before he toppled over, dead.

Dex grabbed Eli’s arm and pulled her towards the side of the building, not even caring that Greg was left unattended; the piece of shit followed the teenagers anyway, another arrow narrowly missing him. “Where’s it coming from?” Eli tried to see where the arrows were being shot from; Dex grabbed hold of Greg’s collar and shook him.

“Who the fuck is shooting fucking arrows at us?” He barked, “What do you want from us?” He shook the man with each word, but Greg’s smug look no longer present, replaced by absolute terror.

NaNoWriMo: Day 2, 3 and 4

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I didn’t listen to Past Mata, for that I am extremely annoyed. Past Mata said to have over 4,000 words written and Present Mata’s eyes keep trying to close. Procrastination reared its ugly head over the weekend so this is what you get for days 2-4. Don’t judge me. I will do better tomorrow.

Currently Untitled: Day 2, 3 and 4

Word Count: 878

Eli immediately slid back down to where her shovel lay, but before she could reach it the cool barrel of a hunting rifle was pressed against the back of her neck.

Crud.

A different voice to the one they’d heard before, injected with the same self-satisfaction, crooned down at her. “Come on love, no need to be so hasty aye?” Eli squeezed her eyes shut, cursing her own cockiness and stupidity. She didn’t dare look at Dex now, knowing all she’d find in those light brown eyes would be a silent ‘I freakin’ told you so.’

“Aw mate, what’s that? A shovel?” The voice they’d heard earlier shouted out from the other side.

“Yep.” Replied Rifleman. “Now be a good girl and make your way out, so that your boyfriend there can also come out, and have a chat with us.”

If voices were anything to go by then all they had to deal with were two men, two grown men and one had a rifle. Eli started to think their way out, Dex had some muscle to him she thought desperately- and Eli could fight her way out of a scrap any day. And this was even before the Incursion. Their problem lay in the gun.

“Nice and easy love.” She stood up, feigning nonchalance as she dusted the front of her jeans as if she was just getting up from having a picnic. Not that she’d had many picnics before the Incursion; her family wasn’t the picnicking type. She looked at the man’s shoes, worn work boots, and made a note of the fact they weren’t steel capped. It could come in handy.

“Now you, boy. Get out from under there.” Eli could see Dex’s jaw clenching as the rifle nudged his head, “We don’t have all day, son.” Rifleman muttered, Eli glanced back at the other man, who was walking over from the other side of the car, and back again- only just making out a lone bead of sweat making a hasty retreat from Rifleman’s receding white hairline. When Dex finally stood, Eli found it difficult to disguise the amusement she felt bubble up at the fact that Dex was a good head taller than either men. It could definitely come in handy.

Noting, with a smidgen of hope, how Rifleman’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he tried to discreetly gulp, Eli fixed her gaze on the other man who seemed slightly younger than Rifleman, he pushed his glasses up his hawkish nose. “What do you want from us?” Her voice sounded raspy to her own ears. She tried not to scowl.

“We’re just curious, is all. No need to be worried, love.” Rifleman said from the other side of Dex, the younger one, stood beside Eli eyes taking in her bunned hair, calloused and dirty hands and fraying clothes.

“Then why’s he holding a fricken’ gun to my head?” Dex growled, there was barely a step back from Rifleman, but it was enough for her to realise that he wasn’t at all prepared to shoot anyone today. It was in the way his murky grey eyes could barely bring themselves to meet theirs. If Eli wasn’t mistaken, it was almost as if Rifleman wasn’t someone who shot people on a daily basis, either for survival or not. He definitely looked more and more like someone who couldn’t kill a teenaged boy and girl in cold blood.

“Precaution.” Glasses responded, his thin lips almost invisible, as his beady black eyes regarded the two teenagers with something that looked an awful lot like disdain. Eli wasn’t convinced he wasn’t possessed by something. She couldn’t see any signs that he was, there was no cracking beside his eyes, and by now it would have either attacked them or tried to take possession of their younger bodies. “Where are you two headed anyway?” Glasses asked chattily, looking between them as though they were old friends. He leaned on the shovel, my bloody shovel Eli thought, and gestured towards Dex, “Looking for a nice place for your little tryst?” Although he had a head full of hair it was so thin you could see his white scalp and at this moment Eli wanted nothing more than for him to fall flat on is face and for that scalp of his to crack open.

Glasses moved towards Eli, his tongue licking basically non-existent lips. “Because I can show you somewhere, I can take you there myself.” Eli wasn’t so sure what to think, mostly she was angry because he still had her shovel. The handle looked particularly uncomfortable under Glasses’ kneading fingers. She considered immediately jabbing his face. She prepared herself to do so; she looked over at Dex whose brown eyes caught hers. She hoped she could convey exactly what she was thinking to him, judging by the way he nodded without taking in any of his surrounding she knew her plan wouldn’t be making it past the first stage. Public reading.

“Now, tell us what you’re doing out here during the day.” Rifleman’s voice wavered only once, Eli noted how he glanced nervously at Glasses.

“Yeah, actually, we’re on our way to see your mum.” Dex muttered.

And so begins NaNoWriMo: Day 1.

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I’m going to post what I write at the end of every day as a way to motivate (and shame) myself into actually completing NaNoWriMo this year. I need a win this year guys, and I don’t just mean for NaNoWriMo. I want to accomplish something, anything. So yeah, started this at midnight last night (it’s now the end of Day 1) and I present to you the beginnings of what I hope will come together to form something tangible and complete by the end of this month. 50,000 words, let’s go!

Currently Untitled: Day 1

Word Count: 1453

The world is a vile place, Eli thought, nudging a lifeless limb aside with her sneaker-clad foot. Just a huge ball of- “Well, you’ve never actually experienced the world, have you?” The conversational tone of her friend, at odds with their abysmal surroundings, cut through the internal monologue she hadn’t realized she’d been uttering aloud. Rude. “So, really, you don’t know that all of it’s vile aye.” Dex continued walking ahead before stopping to use the machete in his hand to scrape something that looked suspiciously like a dried up piece of intestine from the bottom of his shoe.

Her brown eyes slit slightly, “well our world is a vile place.” She responded, emphasizing the ‘is’ with a point of her shovel in his general direction. He half turned back towards her and started prattling on about crap that was or wasn’t ‘vile.’ She studied his profile as he spoke, deciding that with his clean cut features and proud, if slightly crooked, nose weren’t too much of an eyesore. Although the crooked nose wasn’t hereditary, it was the result of a few failed re-settings after a few too many blows to the face. He may not have been an eyesore, but his constant need to offer a smartarse remark to anyone and everyone was definitely a headache.

‘All of that is great, but I just tripped over a dead body so…’

“Dead body, or human looking log?” He asked, walking backwards to maintain eye contact. Eli stared, trying not to laugh.

“That is the stupidest thing I’ve heard.” She said as lightly coloured brown orbs, telling of some European ancestry she never bothered to ask about, glinted at her from within thickly lashed cages. Eli envied his eyes. She really did, they were wider and lighter, almost hazel. For the most part one could have easily mistaken them for siblings; their skin was the same burnt sienna, the brown colour of Polynesian decent. Both of them had dark unruly hair, but where hers was braided into a long plait in an attempt at taming it, Dex, who refused to go by his full name of Tanielu or Daniel in English, had been her close friend since before the world went to shit. It happened all too quickly, one moment Eli was walking home from school with Dex, talking about how neither of them wanted to participate in White Sunday items and the next they were wading through bodies of people just praying they didn’t come across family members or friends. Running and hiding from monsters that devoured and monsters that killed for play. And, perhaps more frighteningly, from the government that was supposed to protect them. New Zealand wasn’t a particularly big place, so it became harder and harder to find places to hide and it became increasingly apparent as time wore on that their main concern was the Nationals. The party in power when everything went wrong, soon Eli wasn’t just running and fighting inhuman monstrosities, but people. Some of them she’d known all her life. It was difficult to make any sense of, and the more Eli tried, the more everything seemed set against being understood. All she was aware of was the fact that the transition from life as they knew it to this hell they were living was abrupt and harrowing.

“Els, why do you always have to see the negative? Focus on the positive.” With his machete, a glorified knife, he pointed at the sun. She had to admit it was a nice change from the normal grey clouds and rain of Auckland. “The sun’s shining, we’re alive and we live in a…” he faltered slightly, running his free hand through his dark hair.

“I’m waiting.” She stopped, and if she hadn’t been holding a large shovel, she would have folded her arms. “Tell me, D, about the magical paradise we live in.” When he didn’t respond, Eli gave a short snort of derision, “sole,” Samoan slang for ‘dude’ pronounced sol-eh “look around.” She gestured at the carnage before them that used to resemble a decent neighbourhood. Cars with broken windows and dried blood littered the street, right alongside actual litter. If Eli didn’t know better, you would think she and Dex were the last people alive in the country. This wasn’t true, however, there were people alive. Just not brazen enough to come out during the day in search of food and supplies.

Eli studied her fingernails for a second, cracked and blackened, quite fitting for the dirt and blood that she seemed to accumulate daily. “This isn’t exactly the clean green New Zealand it used to be, is it?” Stabbing her shovel into the ground so she could pull her plait up into a bun, Eli looked at her reflection in the glass window of a nearby shop. She was a little underfed, but that was to be expected when they were lucky to find any food remaining in looted stores. Hunting wasn’t great in such a small country, where most animals were small native birds and pests, however Eli wasn’t ashamed to admit they’d had to roast a few possums over the last few months. Food was food, in fact she’d heard of a group of people that had gone in search of a possible source of food from the Auckland Zoo, but it came to no avail as the Nationals had anticipated this desperate move and set up troops to trap those unfortunate enough to try. Nice place for picking up sacrifices.

Tightening her bun and offering her reflection a scowl, Eli grabbed hold of her shovel as she heard footsteps. “Els, you hear that?” Something clanged loudly and the footsteps sped up, in broad daylight Eli doubted it was anything inhuman, or at least anything inhumanly fast.

Dex’s voice, lowered significantly, made her turn to look at him. She nodded, before scanning the area for the nearest place to take cover. Spotting a car on its side she indicated towards it, the noises were louder now, definitely coming from behind the building closest to them. Jerking her head in the direction of the car they both took off, as quickly and quietly as they could, Dex’s lean form just as silent as Eli’s slighter one. They reached the car, which was propped up against the wall, leaving a gap just big enough for them to slip in between. There was barely enough room to be able to crouch, so they had to lie on their sides, Dex with his back against the wall and Eli with her back against Dex’s chest. This wasn’t unusual for them, there were many times when they’ve had to hide in small spaces, elbows in each other’s faces, or knees painfully pressing into one or the other’s back, at least this time they were semi-comfortable. They heard no voices, just footsteps and the occasional clatter of what could have been weapons dropped or noises to draw out, people or things, from hiding. Eli’s heart beat in her throat whilst Dex’s heart seeming to beat against her back, as they waited for what seemed an eternity, but was probably only a minute before Eli gave up. Patience wasn’t one of her strong suits.

When it seemed that the footsteps had started to trail off she pushed up slightly, placing her shovel as quietly as possible beside, almost beneath, her. She wanted to see what it was that made them run and hide like a couple of scared children. Which, considering she was only sixteen and Dex was only seventeen, children is what they legally were. Not that the law was something anyone lived by nowadays. Dex’s hand clamped down on her side, “What are you doing!” He whispered through clenched teeth into her ear, “If you’re seen, depending on who it is, we’re both dead! Or worse, next on the sacrificial plate.”

Eli grabbed hold of Dex’s hand and pushed it away, “Don’t be such a little bitch!” She turned her head up, not craning back enough to see him, but so that she was sure he could hear her without her having to speak above a whisper. “Whoever it is, has got to have passed by already, there’s nothing left on this street. We can’t stay here forever you sook.” Inching upwards, she could hear Dex mumbling under his breath but Eli took no notice of it as she inched her head further out from behind the car in an attempt to see what or who had come through. However she was presented with an empty street before they heard a male’s voice from the bottom where they had initially crawled in.

“Now, what have we got here?”

The Death Cure Review

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What’s that I hear? I finished this book months ago and haven’t posted a review despite the fact that the book’s been out for over two years? Pipe down shuckfaces, I’m getting to it. Who’s ready for a chat about the conclusion to James Dashner’s dystopian sci-fi trilogy? Where do I begin, how about I start at ‘can I get an Amen now that that’s over?’ AMEN! Also, fair warning, this review will contain SPOILERS.

Not that it matters, because no questions were answered in the making of this book, apparently. And there were a lot of questions to be asked. Like why Thomas joined WICKED in the first place, and why wouldn’t you want your memories back in order to understand what exactly you were rebelling against?! And who the hell makes a ‘plague’ to control entire populations without first testing out what exactly the bloody side-effects are? If you scratch the plot enough I feel it’ll crumble like a brittle branch on a tree that’ll see you plummet from that place you sit suspending your disbelief.

If, like me, you tore through the book trying to find a reason to like Thomas let me save you the trouble- there isn’t one. I’m kidding, but seriously I think in the end he should have sacrificed himself for the sake of the others. Because sure he considered everyone his friend, he may even have had conflicted emotions in regards to Teresa and Brenda (more of which I will discuss further below in it’s own category of ‘What the actual?’) but in the end Thomas felt like someone being pulled along by forces outside of his control no matter how he responded.

Minho and Newt were the only characters I liked, aside from Jorge who was just around and did cool things like calling everyone ‘brother’ in Spanish- every time he spoke, ‘hermano- what jew doing? Hermano, no don’t do that ese.’ Great characterisation. Now I liked Minho because he was a simple guy- wanted to survive, did what it took and was just likeable. I don’t know whether it was because in contrast to Thomas, anyone could have been likeable, but I found Minho much more pleasant than I did Thomas. Also, the emotion. Minho had more human emotion in his pinky than Thomas seemed to have in his entire body. Chestnut aside, Minho was an interesting character which I would gladly read more about.

Now Newt. Dear, sweet, unfortunate Newt. Another well-written character having to interact with poorly-written ones- I’m looking at you, Thomas. I felt more of an affiliation with the Cranks than I did with Thomas, and I don’t know if this says something about me in particular, or whether it’s because I have a point. I’m going with the latter. Newt, struggling with the weight of knowing he’s slowly going insane with the Flare, wants Thomas to kill him. He’d given Thomas a note to read when the time was right, ”Kill me. If you’ve ever been my friend, kill me.” Thomas doesn’t have the balls to do it until much later, shooting Newt in the head. Understandable, who’d want to shoot one of their best friend’s in the head? But it’s choosing the lesser of two evils, letting Newt live out the rest of his days the way he was going, as a Crank, would have been the cruelest option by far.

What the Actual?! I understand the need for a triangle, the romantic angle appeals to the reader, I suppose, keeps ‘em in suspense. Here’s the thing, while romance and a romantic triangle have the potential to humanise a book, when done well, it just aggravates the reader when executed poorly. And it was executed rather poorly here. First of all, it would have benefited from fleshed out female characters. Teresa was around for all three books and I felt like I hardly knew a thing about her, certainly not enough to decide whether or not I liked her- and then she’s just killed off. Thomas’ reaction is priceless. It’s like he’s watching Teresa get onto a train, rather than be crushed to death by a slab of ceiling which she saved him from. If Thomas were to be examined by the authorities, following the death of a spouse, they’d rule that he’d concocted the entire thing in order to start dating Brenda. It just seemed that way, okay? And who the hell is Brenda in the end, but someone who also lied to him from the beginning of their relationship? At least Thomas had known Teresa since he was a child and what she did she did out of necessity- at least in her own skewed way. We won’t really know because Teresa’s motivations were largely kept from us. And we’d also never know if Thomas and Brenda knew each other before the Flare because Thomas refused to let them return his memories. In the end Teresa’s death seemed almost inconsequential to Thomas, I think he cared more about Chuck’s death- and Chuck’s death was a product of WICKED’s control.

I suppose it was a way to redeem Teresa’s transgressions and open up the pathway for Thomas and Brenda to skip happily off to a paradise filled with Munies (derogatory term for Immunes), but it just came off looking like a cop out. Yeah, I said it. Suddenly Teresa was expendable? Honestly, Dashner should have made the ultimate sacrifice and killed off Thomas.

I don’t know if I have much else to offer, if you’ve made it this far I’ll give you this. Dashner’s writing improved, his characterisation took a dive and his world-building, granted it’s ours just set in a world where the our Ozone layer’s gone kaput and the sun’s scorch has ravaged the land and the governments stupidly released a plague to control people but it backfired and ended up making them UNcontrollable, is pretty cool. But this is a series I’m quite happy to be done with.

Doesn’t mean I’m not excited for the film. Yay!

Honourable Mentions:

- I was left feeling like one of the subjects, kept in the dark for the most part and wishing I was somewhere else.

- Even Janson felt more developed than Thomas and he was the bad guy. Also, what a wack job- but then again he had contracted the Flare. What was Thomas’ excuse?

- Chancellor Paige stepped out of those memos and into our hearts. Not really, but Wicked is Good. Also, not really. Every government that took part in the release of the Flare were incompetent fools. Wicked is Stupid, more like.

- I may review Rae Carson’ Fire and Thorns trilogy next. Great female protagonist, interesting world and lore, an all-round epic read. Any thoughts? Anyone? Anyone out there? *echoes*

The Maze Runner - Review (Spoiler free, can it be? Yes, yes it can.)

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When was the last time I reviewed something that wasn’t a TV show or the X Factor NZ? (See what I did there? Snigger.) Well I can’t tell you- technically I could, but there’s no way I’m going to muster up enough bother to go a clicking for the answer. So let’s just have a chat about the Maze Runner by James Dashner already, shall we? Jess has read the trilogy and I’m half way through it, a wee bit late to the party but hey I’m here! Better late than never, better late than lying in a ditch somewhere, am I right? Yes, words to live by, kids. Now, while Jess is traipsing about in LA, I’m in New Zealand where we’ve finally got some sun but I’ve barely noticed it as I’ve foregone any interaction (sort of) with the outside world in my consumption of the series. I’ve only just managed to tear myself away from my kindle to talk about the first book.

I have to say I found the writing itself slightly juvenile, however the plot and characters were intriguing, keeping me completely engrossed if at times exasperated. So we wake up with our protagonist, hero, main character, pal, buddy in an elevator. He doesn’t know who he is or how he got there, or even where ‘there’ is. All he knows is that his first name is Thomas and, once the doors open, he’s surrounded by other guys around his age who refer to him as a shank. Shank, shuck-face and klunk are just a few slang terms you’ll become accustomed to, hopefully, as Thomas does.

The Glade, this place the kids have been for the last few years, is a large piece of land surrounded by some gigantic walls, gigantic walls that are part of a huge maze. However it isn’t just the huge maze that’s the problem, there are creatures lurking out in the maze are well good at being scary. Thomas’s arrival becomes a catalyst for change, in the Glade. Something unexpected turns up in the elevator after Thomas that completely throws them all for a loop. It isn’t just the memory loss that disorientates and confuses Thomas, and the reader, events that should shed light sometimes only cast more of a shadow.

Written in the third person limited we know only as much as Thomas does, or rather what Thomas reveals to us at any given point. What I mean by that is sometimes Dashner deliberately withholds Thomas from fully disclosing certain ideas or epiphanies in his thinking. Now I’ve never been one for patience, however a little patience can be rewarding if you’re going to read this book. Dashner deliberates the reveal of significant answers generating frustration both from the reader and the protagonist. There’s only so much ‘We can’t tell you!’ from the Gladers and ‘I don’t know!’ from Thomas I can take.

However if you’re keen for a dystopian young adult series with an ambiguous kick, then have a go at the Maze Runner. You’ll have to navigate your own labyrinth as you try to figure out what’s going on without seeing where you’re going, and at times you’ll come run into a bit of a dead end, but you’ll find that your minotaur may be closer to home than you think.

Special Mentions May Contain Spoilers:

- Not a spoiler, just in case someone’s gaze strays down just a shucking excuse to utilise the klunking slang. You shuck-face klunker! If you’re a greenbean to our site then welcome, even if you’re not a greenie I welcome you anyway.

- I think Dean Winchester said it best when he said:

- The movie that’s being filmed as I type? Based on some concept art that EW have released it should wind up looking rather spectacular. I also like the casting.

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