Review: New kid in school -- science fiction as a guide to life

Review of: Revenge of the Star Survivors

Author: Michael Merschel

Publisher: Holiday House

Source: Purchase, Barnes and Noble

Grade: B

You don’t have to be the new kid in school to understand the protagonist’s plight in Dallas Morning News book page editor turned novelist Michael Merschel’s Revenge of the Star Survivors. If you’ve ever been the new hire, the new parent, the new homeowner, the new -- well, you name it -- you’ll get it.

Unfortunately, hero Clark (“like the explorer”) Sherman, who’s facing the first move, and first major trauma, of his young life, doesn’t get it. His parents think moving from their longtime home in Louisiana to Colorado for a job upgrade is a great idea. To Clark, it’s the end of the world as he knows it. Following the example of his favorite television show, Star Survivors, about a spaceship crew lost in the galaxy, he records his thoughts as entries in an astronaut’s log of a journey to an alien world, Planet Festus, aka Loretta T. Festus Middle School.

“We were hurtling across the planet’s surface, seconds away from the drop zone, when my commander spoke. ‘You really want to do this by yourself? You’re absolutely sure?’ The tiny crease between her eyebrows told me she was as worried as I was. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I replied. By which I meant, ‘No, I don’t want to do this at all. . . Please take me home immediately.’ Unfortunately, I sent that second part via psionic mind blast, forgetting that I was not technically capable of telepathy.”

The climate of Planet Festus proves hostile from the start, with its unfamiliar frozen ground and frozen precipitation. The inhabitants are equally hostile, particularly the one bearing a disconcerting resemblance to a “big, carnivorous reptile.” And the planet’s communications system is beyond primitive, having consigned Clark’s previous school records to the local equivalent of a black hole. Fortunately, among the few academic options available to him is Independent Study, which takes place in the school library, aka The Academic Resource Center.

There, at last, he begins to find allies – the aptly-named Ms. Beacon (“the commander of this zone”), and one of the school’s few Asian-American students, Ricki Roi (whose last name Clark misunderstands as “Wah”, a misunderstanding that stymies his attempts to communicate with her outside the classroom).

There’s also Les, an elusive, possibly wormhole dwelling student who will reveal dark secrets about Planet Festus and its leaders. The only thing uniting the disparate threesome of Clark, Ricki and Les: their mutual devotion to Star Survivors. Well, that and their resistance to the rest of Planet Festus.

On their journey through the planet they must deal with bullies, racism, and an evil ruling coalition determined to perpetuate its dynasty. The with whom they will clash in a dramatic conclusion. And as all middle schoolers do, the threesome must also deal with parents who seem initially clueless. At least in the case of Clark’s parents, they finally understand in the end.

This is why, as Clark records in his log, “. . . you should ignore anyone who tries to tell you that Star Survivors is an entertainment program. It is so, so much more. It is a guide to orderly behavior in a confusing world.”

(Unknown to Merschel, his mother had arrived from Colorado for his book’s debut. She was warmly supportive. He was slightly embarrassed that she might think the portrayal of the mom, aka commander, in his book was a portrait of her. Perhaps one day his own children, including two who were in middle school during writing, will write their own books about him. It’s the fate of parents and children.)

At his book’s release this spring at the Lincoln Park Barnes and Noble bookstore, Merschel insisted he didn’t even realize he’d written a middle grade book until others in the publishing business informed him who his audience was. Or who they thought it was. As someone who has dipped for the past thirty years into what my daughter and grandkids were reading, I can attest that good books for children have a universal appeal.

With so much good in Revenge of the Star Survivors, my major complaint is that in its determination to root out all evil from Planet Festus it feels over-stuffed, an over-richness that may have led to its too hurried for my taste climax, as if Clark/Merschel was either tiring of his long battle, or perhaps facing pressure from his publisher to get to the end. And although I initially bought the book intending it as a gift for my soon to be middle-schooler grandkids, I’m going to hold off transferring it for a while, for fear it might prove too terrifying for them. But given the state of life on Planet Earth, they may already be all too familiar with the terrain of Clark's world.

(Next week: summer literary events, contests, conferences, and a Dallas visit from internationally-bestselling Australian author, Kate Forsyth.)

Adventure classics -- In the heart of the beast

The Island of Dr. Moreau

by H.G. Wells

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In deciding to devote the month of July to a discussion of classic science fiction I find myself searching, not for the first time, how to describe this genre. Two modern practitionerst, Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, famously disagree on every criteria except one -- the ability of all not-quite-real fictions to tackle subjects too sweeping for mere realism to address.

I’m going to say I know science fiction when I read it, so I can shoehorn the social commentary of H.G. Wells’ 1896 work, The Island of Dr. Moreau, as well as dystopian near-futurism, humor, and a bit of space opera into a single category for this month’s discussions.

Wells opens The Island of Dr. Moreau with the hyperrealism beloved by writers tempting us to believe their outrageous stories -- an introduction by a supposed relative of the narrator, Edward Prendick, supplying dates, latitude and longitude, and name of the ships whose wreck opens Prendick’s adventure.

Prendick is then rescued by a sinister vessel carrying a cargo of exotic animals and two passengers -- failed medical student Montgomery and his strange companion. Once arrived at its destination, Prendick is forced to disembark also, landing on a remote island governed by the notorious Dr. Moreau.

Moreau’s specialty of vivisection -- surgery conducted for experimental purposes -- has made him persona non grata in Europe. Although Prendick professes to have studied biology with Darwin’s advocate, T.H. Huxley, at first he shows no interest in the happenings of Dr. Moreau’s laboratory, simply trying to ignore the sounds of agony from the experiments and completely failing to connect them with the island’s odd-looking inhabitants.
But when the nature of the screams changes from animal to human, Prendick believes Moreau is trying to transform human beings into beasts. Fearing he is intended as one of Moreau’s victims, Prendick flees -- and at last learns the true nature of the experiments. Dr. Moreau, like Dr. Frankenstein before him, is trying to create not beasts, but human beings, this time from surgically-modified animals. And yes, he cuts and stitches creatures who never existed, such as a mock-satyr, just because he can.

“An adventure story that would once have featured battles with fantastic monsters,“ Atwood writes in Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, “keeps the exotic scenery, but the monsters have been produced by the very agency that was seen by many in late Victorian England as the bright, new, shiny salvation of humankind: science.”

“We do not recommend The Island of Dr. Moreau to readers of sensitive nerves,” a contemporary reviewer in April 11, 1896, edition of The Spectator magazine stated, with no apparent understanding that Wells’ book was anything more than a protest against vivisectionism. This, however, doesn't unexplain the story's power to transcend its time.
 
Atwood attempts an explanation, comparing the story to the tale of another shipwreck survivor, The Ancient Mariner, “which revolves around man’s proper relation to Nature and concludes that this proper relation is one of love.” The Island of Dr. Moreau also contemplates this relationship, but with a twist.

Prendick first saw the beast people of Dr. Moreau as degraded humans. At the end, he finds himself unable to see his fellow human beings as anything other than degraded beasts. The curse he lives under is more terrible than the Ancient Mariner’s wanderings -- the inability to love either humanity or Nature.

For a discussion of science fiction between master practitioners Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, see “Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin debate science fiction” at http://io9.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a July of science fiction and hubris with Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon.)

Wordcraft -- What an editor wants to read

Recently, Lou Anders conducted what he says on his blog was his first ever writing workshop at FenCon VIII in Addison, Texas. Few workshop leaders would be better equipped to tell us what an editor wants to see in the first pages of a novel. He’s this year’s winner of the Hugo Award for editing, long form, and the editorial director for Pyr books. He hears twelve to fifteen pitches for books daily, and he and his assistant at Pyr look at, by his calculation, a thousand manuscripts annually. Of those, Pyr publishes thirty.

After talking through a few of the nineteen workshop submissions, he tactfully formulated “the no prologue, no multiple POV (point of view), no unlikable protagonists rule” of things that turn off readers within the first few pages. Our starting goal as writers is to “give people as few reasons as possible to drop out” of reading a story.

What else turns him off? Perhaps surprisingly for a hard-boiled looking guy -- profanity. “I like to save profanity for the moments that count,” he said.

That’s partly because, he said, for all the emphasis on action in science fiction and fantasy, women and girls constitute the overwhelming majority of readers -- 75 to 90 percent. For YA (young adult), the reader demographic is even stricter -- teen girls and their mothers. Writers must master the art of “getting it past the mothers -- and getting the mothers to read it.”

So what does Lou Anders like? Contemporary sounding language, for one thing. Telling details, for another. He commended a writer for a passage in which a character flipped her long hair from under the handle of her bag, although admitting he might forget to add something like that because “I don’t have hair. . . (but) little tiny details that are realistic prepare people for the nonsense to follow.”

He also likes humor. “Find a way to be upbeat even when you’re downbeat. . .Even dark books have moments of humor, and the darker they are, the more humorous.”

And how to get those sympathetic protagonists? Not by making them pathetic or overwhelmed. But for a struggling character, “If we see what she’s given up and what she’s juggling, we’ll sympathize with her.”


Want more of Lou’s writing advice? See his blog, “bowing to the future,”
http://louanders.blogspot.com And check back here next Wednesday for his discussion of novel structure from a former screenwriter’s point of view and ways to break into writing.

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Looking for markets? Don’t get tricked into forgetting these small publishers’ deadlines timed to coincide with Halloween:

CLIFFHANGER BOOKS -- Submissions window for its second anthology of Paramourtal romances closes October 31. See www.cliffhangerbooks.com
DARK TALES OF LOST CIVILIZATIONS -- Also closing October 31. See
http://ericjguignard.blogspot.com

NAKED READER PRESS -- Quarterly open reading period ends October 31. See www.nakedreader.com

Other deadlines at www.duotrope.com/ although Naked Reader wasn’t there when I last checked.

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Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators, North Central/Northeast Texas, holds its annual conference this Friday and Saturday, October 7-8, at Fielder Road Baptist Church, 2011 S. Fielder Road, in Arlington. Authors, editors and agents will be there. See
www.scbwi.org for registration and details.