So it’s the year 2575 and you just so happen to live on the tiny, ice-covered rock known as Karenza IV, when mega-corp company BeiTech discovers it, and decides to kill everyone on the surface. And your girlfriend just dumped you! Really, could this day get any worse? My name is Marc Filgo, I’m an eighth grader at Rapoport Academy, and the answer to that question is yes. This is the situation Ezra Mason finds himself in in Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s book, Illuminae. Ezra is a teenaged wanna-be pilot who in the evacuation, finds himself on a ship filled with injured evacuees. His ex-girlfriend, Kady Grant, an extremely smart hacker, is on a different ship. All the evacuated ships are trying to make it to a wormhole to alert the wider galaxy to what BeiTech is up to. Throughout the book, Ezra and Kady are battling a malfunctioning AI, a Class Alpha Zero Pathogen, and, of course, the trauma of evacuating and being chased down in space. However, since they were placed on separate ships in the initial evacuation, and weren’t exactly on speaking terms at that point, it might be hard for them to work together to survive. In the series, the main characters Ezra and Kady have to survive against impossible odds, including having to convince the adults who don’t trust them to know what they are doing. Their fight seems impossible, because how do you fight for what’s right when it doesn’t seem like anybody is? Another big theme is the damaged, manipulative AI, AIDAN, whose decisions are logical but not always moral. AIDAN sometimes twists the truth, but philosophizes about the nature of good and evil and contemplates what it really means to be human.This feels relevant today, when we’re surrounded by technology that can create super realistic images and can generate paragraphs of plausible, but not truthful, information, and also tells us what we want to hear through algorithms. The structure of the book makes it really unique. A modern adaptation of an epistolary novel, which is a story told through letters, notes, and journal entries, Illuminae is told after the action, via audio transcripts, military files, schematics, maps, interviews, private messages, and emails which were compiled by the shadowy “Illuminae Group” for a court case against BeiTech. While many pages of the book read normally, other pages in the book are chaotic, with lots of words at different angles, and some are desolate with few to no words on them. It makes the book engaging and really fun to read and puzzle over. One part I especially liked about the book’s structure are what they call the “briefing notes” and the pages from Unipedia (a Wikipedia-like website), which helped give more context to the world the authors were building. This book is the first in a trilogy known as The Illuminae Files. While the entire series is amazing, my favorite book is Gemina, the second book. (Who knew one coffee could cause so much chaos?) The third book is called Obsidio, when all loose ends start getting tied up. The authors Kaufman and Kristoff each have written numerous books separately, however, this series was their first collaboration. If you like the unstable AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the world building of the Enders Game series, I think you'll like Illuminae and The Illuminae Files series. |
Likely Stories - Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
