by Rebekah Markillie |
“Illuminae,” written by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff.
Tired of reading literary fiction and journal articles for class? Try a little young adult fiction for a change. Space wars and young turbulent relationships — what’s not to love? Don’t worry, no spoilers.
The basics: This is a beautiful book. The jacket is semi-transparent and the actual book is covered in lines of text with some of the words highlighted or sharpied-out. It's an epistolary novel comprised of interviews, IMs between the characters, transcripts of surveillance videos and other data made to look like a confidential case file for the government or a PI company. It's fantastic world building. I'm sure many more books in this style will follow — it's brilliant.
The summary: It's the year 2575 and Kady Grant just broke up with her boyfriend Ezra Mason. That afternoon BeiTech, a mega-corporation, invades their planet. Ezra and Katy make it to safety aboard the Alexander, a warship, and the Hypatia, a research vessel. A third ship, the Copernicus, is also carrying refugees. As the small fleet races towards safety, a BeiTech warship, the Lincoln, is in hot pursuit. While onboard, Katy and Ezra start hearing strange rumors about a virus infecting people on the Copernicus.
The details: “Illuminae” is fast and dramatic. It's a long book (599 pages) but a quick read. There is so much action happening all the time. Kaufman and Kristoff did wonderfully with the pacing of the book — everything runs together nicely. Because it's an epistolary novel, there isn't a narrator to provide a peek into the characters’ minds. The reader sees the characters as they would be acting in real life; it’s less about their motives and more about their behavior and reactions.
The page formatting often gives a visual representation of what's happening at the time. These pages provided a nice break from the almost constant IM transcripts that make up most of the novel. It's almost as if Kaufman and Kristoff also got tired of writing like 17-year-olds and wanted to write some nice prose poetry for a change.
Kaufman and Kristoff also bring up some tough concepts like biowarfare and artificial intelligence: Can AI build relationships with people? How do you deal with biowarfare? Is doing something for the "greater good" ever a good justification? Deep stuff. I was impressed.
My biggest beef with the story was the unlikeliness of the whole thing. Maybe 500 years in the future we will be living all over the universe on different planets and whatnot, but an illegal mining operation just getting attacked out of the blue? Nah. I understand that because of its formatting, the book is entirely limited to the character's point of view. I feel it would have made more sense, because it's supposed to be presented as a case file, to have more information about Kady and Ezra's home planet, as well as more information about BeiTech.
“Illuminae” was mildly predictable with quite a bit of foreshadowing throughout. But I've never read anything like it before, and really I enjoyed it. The ending provided some amusing revelations, so I will be looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.
Rebekah Markillie is the design editor for The Beacon and can be reached at markilli17@up.edu or on Twitter @r_markillie
