Show Your Face? (Sometimes a Pose Is Just a Pose Part 1)

So I came across an interesting article about book cover trends a little while back and read through it, and one of the points sort of surprised and actually disturbed me.

Now, one of the first things that attracts someone to a book usually is the cover. Does the cover look interesting? And of course we have a lot of covers with pictures of people on them. The Once Upon a Time YA novel series from Simon and Schuster actually revamped their covers from illustrated to photographic, rereleasing every book in the series so far except two (Scarlet Moon and Spirited) and I actually like these covers a lot better. They're beautiful. I'm a big fan of photographic covers.

But the point that was made by this article was that a certain trend in photographic covers is having a negative impact on feminine identity among teens. This trend is the image of a girl whose face is hidden in some way from the camera. You see this in the Matched Trilogy by Ally Condie (Cassia is always looking away from the reader), in The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer (you see Cinder's foot, Scarlet's arm and part of her upper body but no face, Cress's back and her hair), The Mortal Instruments (hard to see any faces), and in a lot of other books. Then there are the books where only part of the face is revealed (Kiera Cass's The Selection, where part of America Singer's face is hidden by her arm).

According to this article, the trend of hiding a girl's face from view somehow takes away from her strength, from the strength of her identity as a strong character, and from her ability to be viewed as a role model by the reader. I find this interesting, since a lot of novels with strong female leads (The Hunger Games, Divergent, etc.) don't even have images of their stars on the cover at all.

This reminds me of something my sister once told me. Now, I'm biracial. My father is African-American, my mother is Caucasian. When I was little, I had this idea (not because of my parents) that I couldn’t do anything that a biracial person hadn’t done before. As an example, I would play A Little Princess with a friend of mine from down the street, and I was always Sara and she was always Becky, because I had lighter skin than she did and I thought that was how it was supposed to be (in the 1993 film, Sara is white and Becky is black). It wasn’t until I got older (say, eight or nine instead of four or five) that I realized that wasn’t necessarily the way things had to be, and I learned it was acceptable to put myself in the shoes of a character who didn’t necessarily look like me.

What does this have to do with this book cover trend?

A lot of readers will take in the text description of the main character when they first come across it, but then they'll push it aside and put themselves in the situation instead. It's one of the fun things about reading. This lack of facial imagery on the cover is actually rather conducive to doing that, since the reader isn't stuck with a fully realized image of what the main character is supposed to look like.

I know that when I'm reading a really good book, I have a hard time slowing down enough to visualize everything, so if I don't have an established picture in my head, the MC looks like me, even if she's black or Greek or blond or red-headed or a green Martian with no hair. It's just easier to insert yourself into that character because the physical characteristics are less prominent. Which is probably one of the reasons the publishing companies do it so often.

The other reason? It looks pretty. One of the most beautiful trio of book covers I've seen is for the Matched Trilogy and what the poses tell us about the state of mind of the main character. They're gorgeous. Sometimes a pose is just a pose. Sometimes it's purely aesthetic.

But I doubt the industry is trying to weaken the feminine identity of the female teen masses. At least not most of them. I'm not worried, and I hope that when I'm published, I can have a cover as beautiful as the ones I've listed here.

- LA Knight

Splitting a Sci-Fi Subgenre - the Old Utopia/Dystopia vs the New Straight Dystopia

I hang out a lot on the internet, on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as places like Figment.com, and I've noticed there's a lot of confusion about different emerging genres. For example, what's the difference between urban fantasy and paranormal? Or the difference between space opera and science fiction? What defines steampunk? So I decided to write a few blogs about those different things. This one is focusing on a not-so-recent split in a sub-genre of science fiction that I actually studied for two semesters in high school: Utopia/Dystopia.

In olden days—aka, before The Hunger Games came out, which caused a change in how such literature was written—you couldn't have a dystopia novel without the concept of utopia. For those who don't know, a utopia is a perfect world where there is no crime, no unhappiness, no darkness, nothing. Everything's great. Fantastic. Perfect.

Of course, everybody knows that old phrase, "You can't please everyone." Same applies here. You can't have a real utopia in a world run by normal humans. Or even robots, actually, if you look at the film I-Robot with Will Smith. A utopia, by its very definition, can't exist without squishing somebody's happiness. And therefore you get the dystopia aspect—the part of the utopian society where all the crud and bad stuff pops up.

1)    In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, it was the destruction of basically anything that made you think too hard and thus question the rights and regulations of the government—namely, books. Except there are people who still like reading. Thus the conflict of the novel.

2)    In the film Soilent Green, they solve world hunger. Cool, right? Except they do it by resorting to a form of cannibalism ("Soilent Green is PEOPLE!") and it's this big government conspiracy involving murder and such.

3)    There's an episode in season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation about a planet whose culture has almost zero crime and everyone is so happy all the time. Sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? But how do they manage this? Because any infraction, no matter how small, is a capital crime. You die for walking on the grass if there's a "Keep Off" sign. That's crazy, right?

4)    A short story called "The Lottery" tells of a town without crime of any sort because the town gets out all their aggression, all their evil feelings, by stoning a town-member to death once a year, chosen at random via lottery.

5)    In Ayn Rand's novella Anthem, the peaceful, productive culture of the main character is preserved by the destruction of the human ego—the destruction of the concept I AM in the human psyche. Does it work? Of course not. Thus the conflict in the story.

In all these books and movies, we have the concept of utopia ("everything's fine, don't challenge the status quo, it's for our own good") paired with the actuality of the dystopian world ("pretend everything's fine, don't challenge the status quo or something terrible happens to you, just keep smiling and pretend it's for our own good"). But the publication of The Hunger Games changed this genre forever.

How?

By stripping away the concept of utopia from the utopia/dystopia subgenre.

I won't say it was for the first time (I haven’t read everything, believe it or not, lol), but for the first time on a nationally bestselling scale, the idea of "Big Brother is watching you for your own good" was ripped out of the utopia/dystopia novel, leaving only the aggressive resentment of "screw off, Big Brother; stop being a creeper."

In THG, for the first time, the reader sees a totalitarian government viewed for the sucky, civil-rights-smashing fist of tyranny that it is. This revolutionized the utopia/dystopia subgenre, creating a completely different genre of novels: the straight-up dystopias, books about worlds with unfair rules that people either view as necessary evils to combat even greater evils or actually acknowledge as sucking and try (or have tried) to do something about them—even if it's only to get out and get away as soon as possible.

Some of the best versions of this that I've read so far are the following:

The Chemical Garden Trilogy—Lauren Destefano

The Divergent Trilogy—Veronica Roth
The Hunger Games Trilogy—Suzanne Collins
The Iron Codex Trilogy—Caitlin Kittredge
The Lunar Chronicles—Marissa Meyer
The Razorland Trilogy—Ann Aguire **
The Red Death Duology—Bethany Griffin
The Selection Trilogy—Kaitlin Cass
 
** The Razorland Trilogy is actually a terrible series, badly written and completely implausible based on human physiology, BUT! It's a perfect example of a dystopian novel where the government sucks but is considered a necessary evil, so I included it in this list.

Basically, the publication of The Hunger Games gave rise to a sci-fi subgenre of novels where the main character(s) faced a corrupt government or ruling class or system that everyone (or mostly everyone) actually acknowledged was in fact corrupted. Generally this government came into power after some sort of apocalyptic something or other:

1)    The Chemical Garden Trilogy—a series of natural disasters and the outbreak of a genetically transmitted virus (incurable as of book 1) that killed about 50% of the world's population when males hit 25 and women hit 20 and is slowly eradicating everyone else as those birthdays approach. In this series, the government isn't the problem. It's the father-in-law of the MC; he's basically lord of the manor, as it were, and she's stuck under his power unless she escapes. This ruling class (subject to the government, but with more power than everyone else) is the corrupt group.

2)    The Divergent Trilogy—the outbreak of a huge war (though this governing system put into place afterward, while somewhat corrupt, is not totalitarian, and has only been in power for perhaps three or four generations; the corruption doesn’t begin to truly manifest until a couple years before the events of the first book)

3)    The Hunger Games Trilogy—a series of massive, catastrophic natural disasters crushing the American population to about 500,000 people (if that) set up the establishment of the current government about 150 years before the start of the trilogy; a war 74 years before the book's beginning started to take out said government, only to be quelled by the complete nuclear eradication of 1 of the 13 rebel districts (among other measures).

4)    The Iron Codex Trilogy—an alternate-history of the 1940/50s during the Red Scare, so no natural disasters, but with the appearance of strange preternatural creatures that actively hunt humans about 50-100 years prior to give the humans an "enemy" to fear, similar to what the Nazis did with the Jews; also set against the backdrop of a much more intense Cold War without the historical influence of World War II.

5)    The Lunar Chronicles—set in a country that kind of sucks regarding civil rights anyway (China, part of what's called the Eastern Empire after World War III; yes, that's WW3) and during a long-lasting outbreak of an incurable but highly contagious plague known as letumosis (thus giving the government the right to shut stuff down, arrest people, etc. if evidence of this disease is found). You actually see the difference between the Eastern Empire and France in book 2; the dystopian part is only in book 1 so far, and only for the main character, a cyborg (considered less than human in that country). Also set during the very tentative cease-fire between Earth and a technologically advanced alien race that wants to wipe us out for being an inferior species, so we've got the us/them mentality in use as well.

6)    The Razorland Trilogy—zombie plague and chemical/nuclear warfare about 60 years ago drove everyone underground (as far as the MC knows) into enclaves run by small councils.

7)    The Red Death Duology—war, natural disasters, and terrible incurable plagues created by chemical warfare maybe 20-30 years prior to the start of the novel; in this one, the government isn't so much the problem as a single (insane) person running the government in a principality set somewhere in Europe or the Mediterranean (they don't tell you which; only that there are crocs in the water, but they might've been imported by the psycho). Things really go to Hades in book 1 when the leader of the rebels decides to infect everyone with the Red Death (yep, from the Poe story) as a means of waging war on the city and its psychotic prince.

After the apocalyptic something or other, the government may start out nice, but then turns evil or malevolent in various ways, slowly, stealing the rights and livelihood of the people over time by corrupting those who can be corrupted and killing those who can't. That's a big background plot device in The Red Death Duology, The Hunger Games Trilogy, and The Iron Codex. And unlike in the old utopian/dystopian  novels, people actually notice. How they handle it may vary, and such discussions are for other blog posts, not this one.

A quick aside: I left out a few series that might seem to fall under this category—The Matched Trilogy by Ally Condie, for example, or The Delirium Trilogy by Lauren Oliver. The reason I left these out is because to explain how they fit the parameters would be an entire blog in and of itself. I'll get to it at some point, though, I promise. I've already reviewed Lauren Oliver's Delirium, but I intend to write an essay/blog about it at some point as well. I also plan on doing a four-part essay on apathy, blame, fear, and hope as used by dystopian governments in novels as effective coercion tools, here.

So, to sum up: in order to have a dystopian novel (whether utopian/dystopian or straight up dystopian), tyrannical governments/rulers/ruling forces must be present. For it to be a dystopian novel without the concept of utopia, the masses can't buy into the dictatorial lies.

Now everybody go read The Iron Codex. It's awesome!

LA Knight

I Don't Wanna Be a Team Player!!

Something terrible has happened, my beloved followers (aka Whisper, lol). I have become something I used to shun and abhor. A vast network of literary evil has slowly worked its dark tendrils deep into my psyche and slowly taken me over, turning me into that vile monstrosity that I once risked my cyber-life to fight on a daily basis.

I have become a Team player.

We all know the Team phenomenon. It began with Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, with the advocation for either the werewolf heart-throb Jacob Black or the alluring and forbidden Edward Cullen. Can I just say "blech."

Although Twilight came out when I was in high school, I didn't read it until I was well out of high school, living on my own, and the film was out and had been out for a few months. I read it not to read Twilight itself, but to read New Moon, which my friend Whisper had written about in her myspace blog. That particular blog was about how in a conversation with an aunt, her aunt had called Bella psychotic and said that no girl would fall into a depression that deep over a boy dumping them.

My friend of course argued against this POV, because many of our friends in high school did that and worse (an example would be a young friend of ours "grid-marking" her arm to deal with her depression; the result of "grid-marking" looks like someone sliced into that person's forearm with incredibly fine razor-wire mesh. It's fairly gruesome). Although as a teen I was never that self-destructive, I was fairly close.

I'd never found someone in YA that reacted as I would've reacted in such a situation. Then Whisper told me about New Moon, and there it was - something I'd wanted for a long time. So I read the Twilight novels and got hooked (though I am not a Twi-hard - Twilight is too flawed for that, unfortunately - and I've never read The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner). But as hooked as I was, I didn't care a fig for the Team Edward/Team Jacob thing (except that I thought Burger King's thing about Team Bella was just ridonculous because how does one end up romantically involved with oneself? That's just gross). I thought the Team thing was the dumbest thing ever. I still think the Twilight Team thing is stupid.

In fact, in my own paranormal YA series, The Twilight Chessboard (no relation to Ms. Meyer's Twilight universe; the Twilight Realm is another name for the world of Faerie) I introduce a pseudo-love triangle because it gives an added level of tension, but the love triangle in my series isn't very even-sided. There are two guys vying for the girl, yes, but she doesn't want them both. One of them is a complete freak (and not in a high school way; more like a selfish morally abiguous way). It's not even supposed to be a love triangle. The freak guy's just a character, not a potential love interest. But I'm betting if those books hit popular, there will be girls going "Team Jack!" and "Team Darren!" And it will be my unfortunate duty to inform them they are all on Team Stupid. I hope that doesn't happen, though.

However... there are other books that have sucked me into this Team trap. What are they? The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. Matched, by Ally Condie. Wither, by Lauren Destefano. The Iron Thorn by Caitlinn Kittredge. The Girl in the Steel Corset by Kady Cross. These five books have done it. They've turned me into a monster! I blame the Dystopic Epidemic, lol, as all but the last one are dystopian novels.

But anyway, here's my affiliation:

The Hunger Games - Team Peeta

Matched - Team Ky

Wither - Team Linden

The Iron Thorn - Team Dean

The Girl in the Steel Corset - Team Jack Dandy

Why?

In tHG, Gale may or may not be responsible for the death of my favorite character, Prim (thus negating the point of the series in my eyes).

In Matched, the reason Cassia even falls for Ky in the first place is because she begins seeing him in this sympathetic and sympathizing light; as the book is 1st person, the reader begins to view him that way as well.

In Wither, both potential love interests are kind of wussies, but unlike Gabriel, who only pushes the boundaries around him in order to have Rhine (and who acts like a juvenile brat at times), Linden does things in order to make other people happy - not just Rhine, but his other wives as well. And he truly loves Rhine, in a way that you can't be sure of with Gabriel, who is much younger and more impulsive and has never known what it is to be in love before. He may just be in like with Rhine, and the rest is fueled by his hormones. Is that fair to say, just because he's young, especially when Linden is only 21 himself? Maybe not, but when I read the book, Gabriel came off as more selfish and actually a bit whiny at times. The only thing standing in the way of a happy ending between Rhine and Linden is Rhine herself, whose pride and prejudices refuse to allow her to love him.

The Iron Thorn is happiest for me. Aoife doesn't love Cal romantically. Never has, never will. He has no chance. I adore Dean. He's amazing. And, like Aoife, he is more than he appears. Of course, so is Cal, but not in the same way. I love you, Caitlin Kittredge, for making my life so much easier.

As for The Girl in the Steel Corset, which I just finished this morning... there are actually 2 love triangles, one surrounding each girl (the girl in the steel corset, Finley, and the girl who made the steel corset, Emily). Finley is stuck between Griffin King, the 18-year-old orphaned Duke of Greythorne, and Jack Dandy, a rumored crime boss of the London underground who's too charming by half. Emily is caught between Sam the "mandroid," a boy with a robotic heart and skeleton who loves her and is loved in return, and Jasper, a cowboy with super speed (which sounds stupider than it is; it's actually fairly cool).

In regards to Emily's boys, I don't have a preference because while Sam was getting on my nerves at first, he grew up by the end, and we don't know much about Jasper. But as for Finley....

I don't like Griff. He's obsessed with revenge, for one thing, and he lets his jealousy of Jack Dandy cause problems. While he's not willing to throw Sam out of the house (he could go back to the Devon estate) for punching him in the face and trying to legitimately kill Finley for no reason, he is willing to throw Finley out with nowhere to go if her association with Jack Dandy "becomes a problem." While yes, he's 18, that doesn't exactly make him attractive to me.

Whereas Jack Dandy is willing to help Finley whenever and wherever, and while he doesn't particularly like Griff, he saves his life and doesn't let his dislike of the kid affect how he treats Finley. While Jack is a couple years older, that's not really the point.

Two years is a lot in regards to maturation usually when someone is that age, but Griff - due to his position, life story, and responsibilities within the group of the MCs - should know how to reign in his youthful temper by this point, especially because of his powers. So I don't have a lot of sympathy for him as a person. He's a great character, nice and flawed, but as for a rival on the Team playing board... nah.

For once - for once - I would like two guys in a love triangle where I can't choose. Where I'm happy with the girl hooking up with either guy. Where I like them both equally. Where I don't mind if she gets with Guy A or Guy B.

Kind of like how on Wizards of Waverly Place (gah, I know, I'm so pathetic) at the end, both Alex and Justin got to keep their powers. I was happy with that because I liked both characters enough that I didn't want either of them to lose the Wizard Competition.

Why can't we have that in love in books? If we have to have the triangle, can't it be an equilateral, instead of an isoceles? Or would that make the girl too much of a player? The only time the isoceles works is in The Iron Thorn and in Kelly Creagh's Nevermore (there's Varen, who's on the cover with MC Isobel, and then there's Brad. Brad is a psycho; therefore, the isoceles makes more sense than the equilateral). So can we please either have equilateral triangles, or no triangles at all? I would like that. Sigh.