(no subject)

[skygiants]

Does anyone remember Invitation to the Game? I mean, at least someone does, because the reason I reread it is because I hit a good Yuletide fic from last year (Eden, for the curious).

Invitation to the Game is a middle-grade book set in a near-future in which the government assigns professions a la the Giver, except most people are actually assigned to become unemployed underclass, because robots. When protagonist Lisse graduates from high(?) school, she ends up unemployed and living in a giant warehouse with a bunch of her classmates, all of whom are deeply frustrated because they have various useful skills that they are completely unable to use in the current dystopian economy. (Lisse herself is an English major and therefore has no useful skills.)

In other words, for a book written in 1990, it does an astoundingly good job of tapping directly into the post-2008 night terrors of a generation of snake people, so ... well done, Monica Hughes!

Anyway, after they spend a while sitting around and being depressed, they are invited to participate in a mysterious virtual-reality-ish game where they wander around a mysterious landscape and effectively simulate such exciting escapist activities as walking through a desert, climbing random rock formations, not being able to find potable drinking water, etc. Since this is still more interesting than their actual lives, they all get hooked. In the big twist, it turns out that the Game has been prepping them to be dumped on an alien planet. At first they're pretty annoyed about this, but eventually they adjust, congratulate themselves on escaping perpetual unemployment, pair neatly and heterosexually off with another group of Game-players, and settle down to create a happy and productive society of hunter-gatherers.

The protagonists of Invitation to the Game are pretty much flat as cardboard. (Annoying Privileged Rich -- oh, God, and I JUST got why he's named Rich, OKAY, MONICA HUGHES, FINE -- is really the only character who deserves the term, because at least hating everything and being cranky all the time provides something like a personality trait.) The book is compelling anyway, thanks to the world and setting -- and, I mean, who doesn't love a classic group-of-kids-band-together-and-survive-their-environment-against-the-odds story? It's like a very simplistic version of 7 Seeds.

(Though really you should just go read 7 Seeds.)

Comments

[sixbeforelunch]

THANK YOU! I read this book when I was a kid and a few years ago, for whatever reason, I thought of it again but I'd forgotten the title and the name of the characters and 99% of the plot. The where the protagonist graduates has been stuck in my head ever since, with no context. Now I finally know what the book is. I may need to read it again just celebrate. *g*

[skygiants]

You're very welcome! I had the same problem until I found the fic, and I also for some reason was completely convinced it was by William Sleator, who ... in retrospect wrote much weirder books.

[zulu]

A classic! I have the very eighties paperback on my shelf right now.

[skygiants]

The version I got out from the library looked exactly the same as the one I read in the nineties and it warmed the cockles of my heart.

[seekingferret]

Yes! I loved this book growing up, and procured a copy to comfort reread sometime last year. Though yes, the everyone finds a perfect heterosexual romantic match scene is a lot eyebrow raising.

[skygiants]

Also the fact that this results from "after we lived together for three months none of us could IMAGINE dating each other!!" Monica Hughes, I appreciate your dedication to keeping romance out of the story until the last chapter, but that is not how human teenagers work.

[seekingferret]

The alternative explanation is way worse, though: That just as TPTB on Earth designed the groups to have all the skills needed to survive on an alien world, they psychoanalyzed them and engineered the groups to be sure that none of them would want to bone any of the others but would instantly fall in love with one and only one person in the nearest group dropped.

[skygiants]

I'd be more willing to believe that if the TPTB seemed more competent. Like, it takes them halfway through the book to realize the group doesn't actually have a medic.

... and then instead of an actual doctor they get them a psychiatrist. Sorry, Rich, you're at least better than nothing?

[kore]

....this is sounding so vaguely familiar, but I can't figure out it happened because I actually read it and forgot it, or I'm remembering another very similar book. /o\

[skygiants]

It's entirely possible there were other wildly similar books!

[jadelennox]

I love that book even though I recognize as an adult that's it's conservative, monogamous-heteronormative as balls, and overly simplistic. But it is deeply satisfying to the part of me that loved all books about surviving in the wild, except for Hatchet, which is shit.

[skygiants]

I managed to completely sidle all the way around Hatchet despite being reminded of it approximately every two seconds through recommended reading lists etc. But I think it's mostly that I never cared that much about Lone Child Survives in the Wild, I wanted Group Of Children Survive In the Wild, which is much less prevalent! And Invitation to the Game delivered in spades despite the fact that Monica Hughes doesn't reeeeally understand humans.

[adiva_calandia]

Yesssss, I loved this book as a kid! For some reason it's inextricably linked with the song "Sound of Silence" in my head, so every time I hear that I think about it. And the scene where they stay up all night on the new planet and see the Milky Way is still really vivid in my memory.

[skygiants]

It's funny you should say that, because 7 Seeds has a fantastic sequence where one of the kids who's a concert pianist finds an abandoned piano and starts rocking out Bridge Over Troubled Water. Simon and Garfunkel: the official soundtrack of troubled youths exploring alien planets and dystopian futures, apparently!

[sovay]

In other words, for a book written in 1990, it does an astoundingly good job of tapping directly into the post-2008 night terrors of a generation of snake people, so ... well done, Monica Hughes!

Whoa. That's a Monica Hughes I haven't read.

(Devil on My Back was a formative dystopia which I will love forever, even while remaining aware that, re-read by an adult, it's pretty simplified.)

[skygiants]

Somehow I think this might have been my only Monica Hughes -- I just looked at her bibliography and nothing else is looking familiar at all.

[sovay]

Somehow I think this might have been my only Monica Hughes -- I just looked at her bibliography and nothing else is looking familiar at all.

Okay. So Devil on My Back (1984) is almost certainly not a good novel, YA dystopia or otherwise. I read it for the first time when I was in fifth grade and it made a huge impression on me, I suspect because it was one of the first of its kind I'd encountered. Following the ambiguous catastrophes of the "Disaster" and the "Age of Confusion," humanity now resides in a domed city known as ArcOne. It is fearsomely hierarchical and caste-stratified, with status dependent on both heredity and the ability to interface with ArcOne's all-knowing computer—physiological or psychological rejection of the plugged-in "infopaks" can turn even the son of a Lord of ArcOne into a soldier, a worker, or a slave. The protagonist is Tomi, arrogant son of the city's overlord, who is more or less literally catapulted into the outside world during a failed slave revolt, after which he encounters a nature-living community of runaway slaves, has all his assumptions about the natural order of his world overturned, learns to be less of a self-centered, entitled asshat, that sort of thing. There's a prominent plot thread dependent on a song which I realized years later was a filk of "Gypsy Davy." (Specifically, the version of "Gypsy Davy" which I first heard from the Limeliters.) I will always be fond of it, but I make no claims for its literary value. There's a slant sequel, The Dream Catcher (1986), which adds telepathy to the trope mix. You should probably check them out.

The other novels for which she's famous are the Isis trilogy—The Keeper of the Isis Light (1980), The Guardian of Isis (1981), and The Isis Pedlar (1982), of which I remember the first being good, the second being upsetting, and the third inexplicably featuring an interstellar Irish rogue. (Michael Flynn! And his good-hearted daughter Moira, who tries to keep him out of trouble! Why is this stuff taking up room in my brain?) I haven't re-read these books since seventh grade, however, and I can make even fewer claims for them. I don't think I know any of her other work.

[vass]

Huh. I haven't read this one, but I think I read it when it was Galax-Arena by Gillian Rubinstein (two years after the Monica Hughes version.)

That's the one where the kids believe they've been kidnapped by aliens and are being forced to perform dangerous stunts, but one of the kids sees a blowfly and realises they aren't really in space, they're still on Earth. It turns out they were kidnapped and are being forced to perform so that their human captors can siphon off their adrenaline and use it as an eternal youth elixir for rich old people dressed as aliens.

[sapote]

Yes! I HAVE READ THAT! What a weird book. They found out that the aliens were rich old humans because some of them kept human children in terrariums as pets!