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Nick Sagan, Idlewild: I accidentally read the sequel, Edenborn, first, with the result that I already knew the big reveal of the book, so take my review with a grain of salt. Some time from now, a major plague is devastating humanity; researchers are fighting against time to preserve something for the future. This is connected to the students at Idlewild, an elite private school for kids who will grow up to be doctors—the plague isn’t as advanced in their timeline as it is in the researchers’ timeline. The narrative spends most of the time with the teenagers; Hal, the POV character there, is a misfit and rebel who doesn’t want to learn. But his bigger problem is that someone just tried to kill him, and left him with major amnesia about his life. As he investigates, he discovers that everything he thought he knew was wrong. I didn’t think this was as good as Edenborn, because Hal doesn’t actually do all that much until the very end—he just gets told things. While this may be an accurate account of a teenager’s life, it isn’t as exciting as a story in which the protagonists drive the plot. That said, it’s still a worthwhile setup for Edenborn, which I really liked.
Nick Sagan, Everfree: And here’s the third volume, yet another massive change of pace. It’s years after Edenborn, and the world has reworked itself yet again, with Hal and his cohort restoring humanity a little bit at a time. But the people they’ve revived and cured of the plague have ideas of their own about how to govern (hard to blame them, even if they’re just ordinary short-sighted people who happened to have enough power to get themselves frozen). Hal hates politics, but people in large groups—or small ones—are all about politics. This causes trouble as they fight over the secret to reviving more people and the allocation of power in the severely changed world. It turns out that if only the elite survive, you have trouble getting people to make food and clean streets. Who would have thought? I thought Sagan was too hand-wavy with the gender balance/imbalance—he shows us a lot of powerful revived men, but the women, with the exception of one Hollywood ingenue, are generally unmentioned or left frozen in boxes. If that occurred, it seemed to me likely to have pretty serious social consequences not just limited to a tendency towards violence.
Basically, Sagan tried to stuff too many ideas into 3 250-page books. The last 30-odd pages of Everfree deserve a novel or two of their own, not the capsule summary he gives them, and in the last couple of pages, there’s a huge twist. The twist is definitely the right thing to do; I was prepared to be quite dissatisfied with the neat way he seemed to be tying everything up. But conveying it in a few short sentences removes most of the emotional and even the theoretical impact of what he’s trying to say about human nature and survival in a harsh world. It felt like he just got impatient with telling the full story, fleshing out the characters and events, and just sprinted to a finish. In the end, Edenborn was the standout for me, but I liked that Sagan was bursting with ideas and I look forward to seeing what he does next.
Nick Sagan, Everfree: And here’s the third volume, yet another massive change of pace. It’s years after Edenborn, and the world has reworked itself yet again, with Hal and his cohort restoring humanity a little bit at a time. But the people they’ve revived and cured of the plague have ideas of their own about how to govern (hard to blame them, even if they’re just ordinary short-sighted people who happened to have enough power to get themselves frozen). Hal hates politics, but people in large groups—or small ones—are all about politics. This causes trouble as they fight over the secret to reviving more people and the allocation of power in the severely changed world. It turns out that if only the elite survive, you have trouble getting people to make food and clean streets. Who would have thought? I thought Sagan was too hand-wavy with the gender balance/imbalance—he shows us a lot of powerful revived men, but the women, with the exception of one Hollywood ingenue, are generally unmentioned or left frozen in boxes. If that occurred, it seemed to me likely to have pretty serious social consequences not just limited to a tendency towards violence.
Basically, Sagan tried to stuff too many ideas into 3 250-page books. The last 30-odd pages of Everfree deserve a novel or two of their own, not the capsule summary he gives them, and in the last couple of pages, there’s a huge twist. The twist is definitely the right thing to do; I was prepared to be quite dissatisfied with the neat way he seemed to be tying everything up. But conveying it in a few short sentences removes most of the emotional and even the theoretical impact of what he’s trying to say about human nature and survival in a harsh world. It felt like he just got impatient with telling the full story, fleshing out the characters and events, and just sprinted to a finish. In the end, Edenborn was the standout for me, but I liked that Sagan was bursting with ideas and I look forward to seeing what he does next.