Illuminae, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, is the first book of a young adult series titled The Illuminae Files. The story is set in the year 2575 and most of it takes place in space. The two main characters are Kady Grant and Ezra Mason. Kady, a seventeen-year-old girl with dyed pink hair, who is also a secret hacker, is aboard the spaceship Hypatia. Ezra, who is Kady’s ex-boyfriend, is also seventeen, enjoys playing a sport called geeball, and travels on the spaceship Alexander. The reason that Kady and Ezra are on two spaceships is that a corporation called BeiTech attacked their planet, Kerenza IV. Another important character is AIDAN, an AI (artificial intelligence) who runs the Alexander. The story takes off when refugees from a ship called Copernicus, who are infected with a manmade virus created by BeiTech, try to board the Alexander. This virus was designed to attack the part of the brain that controls fear, and to make the infected people very scared. But because the virus has mutated, people who get sick turn into psychopathic murderers. To make things even worse, AIDAN, the AI, has also gone insane. Releasing the infected refugees into the Alexander and watching the ensuing bloodshed, AIDAN thinks, “Am I not merciful?” Kady and Ezra switch places as first-person narrators for most of the story, in more-or-less alternating chapters called files. Occasionally, a file is inserted from a random character’s point of view. Later, AIDAN’s perspective comes to replace Ezra’s—for reasons that I can’t explain without spoiling a major plot point. One thing that makes Illuminae different from most other books I have read is the formatting, which is both unique and beautiful. When AIDAN comes under attack and begins to glitch, this is shown in an ingenious fashion by random capital letters appearing in AIDAN’s sentences. Curse words are blacked out. Text is interpolated with diagrams, lists, hand-written annotations, and all sorts of schematics. Just by removing my hardcover’s dust jacket, I found so many easter eggs and hidden surprises underneath. Even though Illuminae is a horror sci-fi story, there is quite a bit of humor too, even in the serious parts. At one point, when Ezra sends a drunken text to Kady, it sounds like a drunken teen, complete with horrible punctuation, grammar, and capitalization. I also liked that when Ezra texts his friend James, it seems like a conversation between two immature teens. The characters’ personalities are rich and varied. Some people are silly, some are loving, and AIDAN specifically is sophisticated and poetic, even in its thoughts: “If I breathed, I would sigh. I would scream. I would cry.” This particular phrase appears twice in the book, two “chapters” apart. The second time I read it, it gave me chills. Reading Illuminae I had the strange sense of watching an AI gain human emotions when it used to have none, and develop empathy without being reprogrammed. I was glued to the story, but I felt I was a bit young for the gory parts and graphic descriptions of murder. I would recommend this book for readers thirteen and up. Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. Ember, 2017. Buy the book here and help support Stone Soup in the process!
sci fi
Wilder Girls, Reviewed by Lucey, 11
Wilder Girls is narrated through the perspectives of two girls. The first is Hetty and the second is Byatt. Both girls live in a quarantined school. An infection, also known as “The Tox,” has been going around for eighteen months. The Tox first murdered the teachers and then it slowly started spreading to some students. Reese, one of Hetty and Byatt’s childhood friends, happens to be in their school as well. Suddenly, The Tox infects Byatt and she goes missing. The outside of the Raxter School’s fence is forbidden to cross. Hetty and Reese have no choice but to break the rules and step outside the fence. This thrilling Sci-Fi novel kept me turning the pages until I reached the end. Rory Power’s writing is so sophisticated, it made me feel like I was inside the story. The authors’ enthusiasm is clear throughout this book and there are no dull scenes at all. The side romance between Hetty and Reese is just enough for me. I am not a fan of fluffy romance scenes, but the dynamic between Hetty and Reese was actually an interesting addition to the story. Wilder Girls is one of my favorite science fiction books. I enjoyed all four hundred pages of this book in one day simply because I could not stand not knowing what happens next. I really loved this read. It makes me view the entire Sci-Fi genre differently. Wilder Girls by Rory Power. Ember, 2020. Buy the book here and support Stone Soup in the process!
Flash Contest #27, January 2021: Write a science fiction story about a character who lives one hundred years in the future–our winners and their work
Our January Flash Contest was based on our weekly creativity prompt #134, challenging writers to project themselves 100 years into the future. Entrants took us on journeys to other planets, introduced us to amazing futuristic inventions, launched spaceships and created inventive architecture. Like a lot of the best science fiction, our writers used elements of the present to project us into a possible future. We met realistic characters encountering real problems (such as the longer term effects of climate change), as well as alien creatures and sentient robots. Well done to everyone who worked so hard on their stories, we really appreciated the quality of all the entries this month. In addition to our usual 5 winners and 5 honorable mentions, we selected one entry for publication on the Stone Soup Blog in the coming weeks. Thank you for sharing your creative visions of the future world with us! In particular, we congratulate our Honorable Mentions and our Winners, whose work you can appreciate below. Winners “Stranded” by Rex Huang, 11, Lake Oswego, OR “The Turning Point” by Kaidyn Robertson, 11, Sooke, BC, Canada “A Knock on the President’s Door” by Ava Shorten, 11, Mallow, Cork, Ireland “The Meteorite” by Julia Wang, 12, Wynnewood, PA “True Self” by Yasmine Weinberger, 11, Washington, DC Honorable Mentions “Lunar Scavenger Hunt” by Riya Agarwal, 10, Portland, OR “Zen the Space Robot” by Ender Ippolito, 9, Portland, OR “Bobbo” by Cathy Jiang, 11, Portland, OR “Under the Sea” by Grace Mancini, 12, Glenside, PA “A 100 years by Anaiya Nasir”, 12, Bellaire TX Chosen for the Stone Soup Covid-19 Blog “2020” by Eden George, 10, Brooklyn, NY Rex Huang, 11Lake Oswego, OR Stranded Rex Huang, 11 The cool breeze whistled Anya to sleep as it always had. There were so few comforting things here, she had to talk to the rocks to keep her sanity! The world has long lost their charm of the bright holo screens or the rainbow colored outerwear. No, all that has sunken beneath the waves, across the miles and miles of vast empty sea that was once known as earth. Thankfully, Anya had found a patch of ground not yet swallowed by the ocean’s expanding belly. She still shivers at the thought of her little sister screaming at the top of her lungs “Help me Anya, help me! Help me!” but both of them knew it was hopeless. The ladders, destroyed. Fire escape, long gone for luxury reasons. And the hoverdrones? This makes her shake her head in disappointment. The people were drowning and the wealthy wanted to watch them die? She screamed and screeched at the flying tortoises but to no avail. She could even hear the faintest bit of laughter. But that doesn’t matter. Any day, the water will swallow this tiny patch of land that she has called home for nearly a year. She had been living, surviving each day by drinking the rain water she collected in a bottle that washed ashore, and was eating the tough coconuts from the tree next to her. She guessed they were not ripe, as she had eaten some before and they were much more soft. She had always hoped for the government to make an effort to drain the water, so that she could at least return home albeit without her family. And yet, she knew in her heart that her death by the sea, which agonizingly only came up an inch each day, was inevitable. She stomps the ground in frustration, remembering this, but when she lifted her foot, she found a piece of paper. The paper was really only the second she had seen, besides the sheet from the museum labeled “Ancient Civilization”. She picked up the paper, ever so gently. It shows a drawing of an island similar to hers. It illustrates an island having the crescent shape of a banana with a pin straight at the top. Could it be? She had always thought of her island more like the funky flower pots at home, but she started to visualize the possibility of the bottom of the banana being flooded, she realized this map was about her island! She was excited to the bone, and kept examining what the paper had to show. There was a dot trail from the rose bush she had stumbled upon when first reaching the island leading up the very palm tree beside her feet. This was it! She had heard stories of the olden day’s pirates finding treasures as many times as she had laid in her bed! But there was no big fat X as the old stories had said. So, she flipped the paper, and on that sign there was a mutated grasshopper face. She knew what that meant. It was the new world’s sign of labor and duty. Which meant she had to dig up every place on the island. She quickly assessed the size of the island, and quickly came to the conclusion that it was at least as large as 9 parking lots. No chance. She frantically scanned the paper for any extra clues. And after a couple minutes, she found something. There were trees drawn where the actual trees on the island weren’t. Wondering what this meant, she walked up to a tree and realized what type of tree it was. It was a Corrion tree. Then it struck her: Corrion leaves were notorious for being more moist when being close to metals! She frantically felt the leaves, knowing she had little time to find whatever was buried deep beneath. She eventually found out that it was facing to the very center of the line, and began digging as fast as a dog who knows there’s a bone, knowing that treasure awaits her. She soon found a large metal cone striking out of the ground. This is it, she thought. There has to be some absurd piece of technology hidden beneath, hopefully one that could get her off of the wretched island that was bound to sink as low as all that sunk before. Digging some more, she found. . . another piece of paper. She bellowed in frustration so hard that she made a seagull that was on a nearby Corrion tree squall and fly away. After overcoming this frustrating moment, she had the
