For me, one of the most enjoyable things about a fictional story is the fiction. Sitting down with a good book, or reading at the computer, and finding myself absorbed into an imaginary world with an involving story, and interesting characters. I respect anyone that tries to take their imagination and create a world for readers. But I admire most the authors who can make that imaginary world believable.
Great writers make you feel for their characters. You cry when they’re sad, you get scared when they’re in danger. You think of them as real people. If a story starts to make me question the reality of a character, if I lose hold of the rules of the imaginary world and remember that it’s just a story, it means the writer has lost me and suddenly I’m just reading words on a page.
The Radical Chronicles is one such story. I have a deep appreciation for science fiction, the art of telling a story that "could" be, someday, but isn’t yet. Fantasy, with magic and dragons and totally imaginary worlds, is rooted in making the impossible believable. Science Fiction is rooted in taking today’s scientific possibilities and speculating on where they could lead. If something seems too unrealistic in science fiction, it gets hard to enjoy. And the Radical Chronicles have too many moments that leave me thinking "that’s a little far-fetched."
The first problem is the protagonist, Veronica Quibs. The story follows her first at the age of five, and then around ten or twelve. In both time periods, off in the distant years following 2750, Veronica thinks and speaks like an adult. As a parent, and someone who has long studied the cognitive development of children through literature and my studies to become a teacher, Veronica comes across as unbelievable. She’s also "too good for her own good," as one character says. She has a lot of inexplicable altruism and luck, for someone who has seen her parents butchered and had her friends kidnapped.
The second problem is her supporting cast. They seem stale, stock characters. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, other than that they were cardboard, until she met Corey, a stereotypically behaving homosexual teenager. Corey reads like any swishy, fashion-crazy gay man off of today’s television sitcoms, and that is significantly unrealistic for so far in the future, in a culture where the story’s government has spent years trying to stamp out homosexuality and different ethnic groups. I highly doubt that gay people in the future will be acting like characters from Will and Grace.
The third problem is the plot itself. At the age of ten, Veronica is wandering around the prison facility holding her and the other children of the adults who rebelled against the government, and no one tries to stop or incriminate her despite the apparent use of video cameras. There are no guards. Why there are no guards for these dangerous threats makes little sense, but Veronica’s ability to avoid trouble despite video cameras leaves me scratching my head as a reader.
All in all, I think the author has a definite sense of the history of the shattered USA he’s envisioned for 2750 and beyond. There’s a lot of imagination at play to create the details for such a world. But the story carrying those details doesn’t carry me along, or make me feel invested in imagining that world as a vibrant place I want to visit in my readings.
Especially when there’s a ton of great science fiction handling the same issues with genetics and government repression. There’s Gattica, Brave New World, Heinlein’s stories of Coventry and Nehemiah Scudder’s temple, and even 1984 by Orwell touches on similar themes. Any of those worlds will carry you away better than The Radical Chronicles.
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