Coming to a Host Near You!

The Host by Stephenie Meyer is reputed to be a hybrid of science fiction and romance. As a fan of both genres, I found myself disappointed. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the novel and found many surprising qualities in it. It’s just that the strong attraction and sexual tension usually associated with romance isn’t one of them, and the fear of alien invaders taking control plus understanding of science associated with scifi isn’t the other. So what kept me reading this hybrid?

The novel opens during the “insertion” of an alien into a human host. What caught my attention immediately is that the process is not depicted as the scary, oh-my-god, violent act of pen etseeration that is considered norm for most body snatchers-type stories. Instead the alien occupation comes in the form of a gentle operation, with a Healer implanting a being called “a soul” into the human host. This “soul” is already respected and admired by others of her species because she has lived on more worlds than others of her kind. Hence they name her Wanderer. The conflict is spelled out directly by the Healer in the opening. This wonderful, gentle soul is being inserted into one of the most violent and irrational human host, Melanie Stryder, who threw herself down an elevator shaft trying to avoid capture and occupation by the aliens. The setup is beautiful. It puts the reader on the both sides of the proverbial coin. We admire and are curious about this well-traveled alien who awes her own kind at the same time we empathize and appreciate the strong-willed, rebellious human. Here is a different approach to the body snatching story.

The beauty of the story is the internal conflict which occurs between Melanie and Wanderer. Melanie is cunning, insinuating her own emotions into the Wanderer through dreams and selectively chosen memories about her brother, Jamie, and her lover, Jared, while at the same time keeping specific information about their whereabouts hidden. That information must be kept secret because the Seeker who is assigned to Wanderer follows her, constantly questioning the memories she is able to recover. It is the Seeker’s job to find the remaining rebel humans and bring them back to be occupied by souls. She is obnoxiously aggressive in these duties. In fact the distaste that both Melanie and Wanderer feel for the Seeker is the first thing they agree on. Melanie’s fear for Jamie and Jared’s safety and her desire to be with them is strong enough to eventually infiltrate the Wanderer’s body and mind, slowly making Melanie’s feelings dominant enough to manipulate Wanderer into searching for the concealed camp of Jebediah, Melanie’s survivalist uncle.

Additional conflicts arise when Wanderer is captured by Jeb and his band of human survivors. Wanderer is held hostage in an extensive cave system with humans who want to kill her, but Jeb’s curiosity is peeked by her. He seems to see something in Wanderer, aka Wanda, which the others don’t, so Jeb keeps her alive against popular opinion. Melanie’s beloved Jared hates Wanda even more than the other humans do. This amplifies the inner conflict between Melanie, who wants to touch Jared, and Wanda, who wants to avoid Jared’s violent reactions. The situation is complicated because Melanie is actually jealous of Wanda. Melanie doesn’t want Jared to touch Wanda! Under Jeb’s orders, Wanda participates in the daily chores of living in the community, planting crops, cooking food, etc. Wimpy Wanda is terrified to come out of the hole in which she’s been kept, but likes the thought of contributing to the common good, an idea that permeates the book. Wanderer reacts nonviolently to all the human violence while battling the inner conflict of Melanie’s desire to strike back or reach out. One by one, the humans begin to tolerate Wanda’s presence, then accept her. One human, Ian, even falls in love with Wanda…not Melanie. This creates a strange love square instead of a love triangle between Melanie, Jared, Ian and Wanda.

Wanda eventually wins the trust of the vehement humans with her unflinching nonviolence and desire to promote the common good. This dichotomy of violence-pacifism and egotism-altruism is the story’s strength and its weakness. Wanda acts with such perfect pacifism that she makes Gandhi look like a thug. Even Melanie becomes a compatriot, a friend, and then a sister to this alien intelligence possessing her body. When Wanda insists that she must forfeit her own life to give the body back to Melanie, Melanie rejects the idea. If this doesn’t test the limits of believability enough, the solution does. The humans hunt for and find another human body who is younger and hence more malleable than Melanie. They insert the parasitic soul into this body, which is frail and beautiful with long golden hair. Think of fairytale princess and you’ll have the general idea. Anyway, Jared gets Melanie back, Ian gets to keep Wanda, and all is right with the fracked up world.

This is apparently Ms. Meyer’s first attempt at writing for a mature audience, so we need to be tolerant of the simple sentence structure, vocabulary and happily-ever-after ending. Because, let’s face it, the ideas are fresh against the stale back-drop of body-snatcher mentality. However, as an adult reader I’d like to see a more creative approach to naming than calling doctors “Healer”, alien analgesics  “No Pain”, antibiotics called “Heal” and scar minimizers named “Smooth.” I’d also like to see more complexity in the alien personalities. After all, we expect an alien race that has taken control of at least nine different planets to be more sophisticated and to have a more mature attitude toward the multitude of life-styles presented by species that are Bats, Dolphins, Spiders and Flowers.

There is now a movie based on this book and I’m curious about how they will handle and change the story line of this would-be science fiction/romance. I’ll let you know my take on it after I’ve seen it. In the meantime, I still recommend reading this book.

Rhodes FitzWilliam

Digital Winter: A Book That Won’t Leave You Cold

Digital Winter by Mark Hitchcock & Alton Gansky (Harvest House Books, 2012) is an attention-getting, face-paced read that keeps you turning the page. What more could you ask from a piece of speculative fiction? Yet some people seem bothered by the fact that Mark Hitchcock is a Biblical prophecy expert. However if you enjoy reading dystopia fiction as I do, who better to write it? Couple Hitchcock’s frightening vision of the future with Alton Gansky’s award-winning skills as a novelist and you have a real winner.

I found Digital Winter to have a realistic present-day setting full of the probable military linguistics and security precautions that are appropriate in our digital world according to my readings in the Federation of American Scientist’s Secrecy Blog. There’s the initial discovery of an self-replicating computer virus, suspicions of terrorists, the rush of the President to a secure location and the crumbling infrastructure of a computer-dependent society post-computers.

The story begins with the introduction of Stanley Elton, a successful CEO for San Diego’s largest CPA firm, and his college professor wife, Royce. They are the parents of an elusive central character, Donny. Donny Elton is a 22-year old, monosyllabic computer savant who appears to be a silent central character throughout the novel. The story then moves in quick, short scenes that take us from the upper-class suburb of Coronado Island in San Diego to College Park, Maryland and introduces us to Dr. Roni Matisse and her husband, Colonel Jeremy Matisse, PhD, who is a major figure in the USCYBERCOM division of the NSA, who is by the way a Christian. Life through Jeremy’s eyes shows us the backstage story of the coming digital disaster. It includes enough description and brief history of the setting to give the reader a sense of place without becoming bogged down in excessive details. We follow these characters through standard dystopian events such as losing power, water and the general breakdown of civic order as officials try to stave off social disaster and restore some semblance of order.

Even though those of us familiar with the genre know the story line, we keep reading anyway because we are curious to see where the story will take us and how Shadow, a recurring symbol throughout the novel, plays into events. For instance, why is Donny suddenly making full sentences after years of saying only one word? It is Donny’s opening line of “Shadow, shadow on my right, / Shadow, shadow on my left, / Shadow, shadow everywhere, / Shadow has all the might,” that  reappears at critical points throughout the story, leaving us to wonder about its meaning and Donny’s relationship to it.

The only aspect of this novel that felt surrealistic to me are the main characters. Both the Eltons and the Matisses are professional couples with long-term marriages who are still deeply in love. Maybe it’s just my personal history of being raised in a single-parent home, becoming a single parent myself and not knowing many couples with a long-term love, but their relationships did make me question their character’s validity.

Other than that, I loved the novel enough to read the entire thing one Saturday morning. Though the battle between good and evil is not as flamboyantly obvious as Steven King’s The Stand, but I think that works in the Digital Winter’s favor. I definitely recommend it and look forward to reading the sequel.

Rhodes FitzWilliam