Excerpt from cover art
Over the past few years, the Young Adult (YA) novel has gained unprecedented credibility. No longer is it assumed that targeting young people necessarily excludes other audiences. Perhaps this is due in part to the increasingly undeniable fact that in this digital age, cultural and social agency are available at a younger and younger age to a tech-savvy, early-adopting young generation.
Enter Kady, the heroine of Illuminae, a new YA book by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. Though she lives many centuries in the future, Kady shares with typical millennials the powerful pairing of an unassuming façade with a near-superhuman command of technology. She’s also got the razor-sharp wit requisite to any good YA fiction lead character, and a major dilemma to face: the small, illegal colony where she lives is bombed into oblivion, and all survivors from her community are forced onto escape vessels. But cramped quarters, an enemy in hot pursuit, and a rogue AI system mean that safety is still light-years away.
Since reading this book, I have not been able to contain my enthusiasm for it. I’ve been telling everyone to read it, and I’m telling you too. Read this book. It’s got it all – humour, romance, science fiction, political allegory, horror, psychological thrills, suspense… All of which is to say nothing of the wonderfully inventive format of the book. After an intergalactic war, a big corporation hires a team of researchers to dig up as much dirt on the events as possible, to ensure that their attempt to wipe all evidence has been successful. The research team comes back with a 600-page tome of documents, and the contents of this dossier are what is presented in Illuminae – the narrative is presented as copies of emails, transcripts of audio recordings, print-outs of files from the Artificial Intelligence central processing unit, photocopies of posters, and so on. The authors stretch the limits of the credibility of this form, but the story is so deeply engaging and perfectly paced that I couldn’t have cared less – in fact, there’s a knowing kitsch to the aesthetic of the whole book that makes the whole experience even more engaging, rather than logical anomalies being distracting.
This is a book of immense scope. Outside of the main characters, who held my attention and my sympathy the whole way through, there are so many supporting characters and self-contained vignettes that contribute beautifully to the construction of this intricately detailed world. I can feel tears coming to my eyes just thinking about good-humoured, valiant Sgt. James McNulty, and all he encounters. And the book doesn’t hold back on the horror, pairing significant gore with true psychological impact. None of this feels gratuitous, because the most astonishing thing about this wild, melodramatic teen thriller is that it truly has a lot to say. Our main characters are refugees from a war zone, bombed off their planet and conscripted to the military of their would-be rescuers. And in this situation, we see the protagonists for what they are – scared, underskilled, unbelievably resilient children. There’s a black-and-whiteness to the politics of this world that comes across as defiant rather than immature. Excitingly, there are subtle undertones in this book of a post-race, post-gender society. Characters are very rarely described in terms of their race, nor treated differently according to their gender.
I can’t wait to see the response to this book. I care about it deeply, and I think a lot of other people will too. That it promises to be the first in a trilogy of books is some cause for concern, given how self-contained it seems, but I trust these authors to pull it off. For all its kitschy aesthetics, logic-bending plots and naïve politics, Illuminae is uniquely captivating, hopeful and vital. The director of the inevitable Hollywood adaptation has a huge responsibility on their shoulders. My pick for Kady Grant: Willow Smith.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Illuminae
By Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
Paperback, 599 pages, RRP $19.99
Allen & Unwin
