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A review by june_moon
The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell
2.0
Right on the back cover of this novel, there is a bold-faced comparison to “Brave New World” which is probably where I got the wrong idea. I know I shouldn’t get my hopes up when books claim to be like other books, but there’s not much I love more than classic speculative fiction so I took the bait. Unfortunately, I found the major elements of my beloved sci-fi to be lacking in this novel. The world-building was sparse, the overall vision of society felt disjointed and confusing, and I was not struck by any pertinent social commentary. This is an insular narrative focusing more on intrapersonal conflict than typical dystopian novels' focus on the general condition of society itself.
To form its dystopia, "The Only Ones" relies on the one-note of mass hysteria over outbreaks of illnesses (in this way, it is more similar to the zombie genre than to speculative fiction). Pandemics and epidemics or “pandys” and “Epis” are common in this world and wipe out hundreds of thousands of people with every new wave. Modern medicine has failed (the vaccines are just as deadly as the illnesses) and people spend their lives watching the TV for news of the next outbreak and directions on where to evacuate to next. The probability of survival for the human race seems pretty bleak. The only type of person who has a chance to make it in this world are “hardies,” or those that have been biologically engineered to resist every bug. Of course our narrator, “I.,” is one of these “goddamn Sylvain hardies,” and the novel is spent following her life.
There is no thrill in following I.’s time in this society because we already know she is immune. Although wave after wave of new illnesses ravage the world around her, we never feel tension or fear because I. isn’t affected. The diseases are the villains of the world, but they are not the villains of I.’s story. So what is?
As the story trudges along, I. finds herself donating her hardy eggs and DNA to some black market scientists who try to incubate them just “to see what happens” and then maybe sell them. We spend pages and pages seeing what happens: which eggs die, which eggs survive, which eggs begin to grow, and that finally one becomes a fully-formed human baby. Is it a clone or is it an autonomous human being – or can it be both? This is the tiniest suggestion of a theme that emerges for the second half of the novel. Set in a back-drop of a “pandy”-ravaged society complete with covert and shady scientists, dubiously mandated quarantines, and a barely-conceived state apparatus, we instead spend our time with I. and her “cute” clone baby isolated in an apartment. That the child is “so cute” is mentioned a gratingly excessive number of times. This novel would benefit from some heavy editing. Well, like, every page has at least one sentence that begins with “well,” and is spliced with “like”; random words are made into proper nouns that do not need to be Proper Nouns; and the narrator ends statement after statement with a question mark? The narrative style is intriguing at first but once it’s clear that there is no plot, stumbling through the strange narrative affect becomes arduous and irritating. You wish that the book would just get to the point, the twist, the heart-wrenching moment, but it never does.
To form its dystopia, "The Only Ones" relies on the one-note of mass hysteria over outbreaks of illnesses (in this way, it is more similar to the zombie genre than to speculative fiction). Pandemics and epidemics or “pandys” and “Epis” are common in this world and wipe out hundreds of thousands of people with every new wave. Modern medicine has failed (the vaccines are just as deadly as the illnesses) and people spend their lives watching the TV for news of the next outbreak and directions on where to evacuate to next. The probability of survival for the human race seems pretty bleak. The only type of person who has a chance to make it in this world are “hardies,” or those that have been biologically engineered to resist every bug. Of course our narrator, “I.,” is one of these “goddamn Sylvain hardies,” and the novel is spent following her life.
There is no thrill in following I.’s time in this society because we already know she is immune. Although wave after wave of new illnesses ravage the world around her, we never feel tension or fear because I. isn’t affected. The diseases are the villains of the world, but they are not the villains of I.’s story. So what is?
As the story trudges along, I. finds herself donating her hardy eggs and DNA to some black market scientists who try to incubate them just “to see what happens” and then maybe sell them. We spend pages and pages seeing what happens: which eggs die, which eggs survive, which eggs begin to grow, and that finally one becomes a fully-formed human baby. Is it a clone or is it an autonomous human being – or can it be both? This is the tiniest suggestion of a theme that emerges for the second half of the novel. Set in a back-drop of a “pandy”-ravaged society complete with covert and shady scientists, dubiously mandated quarantines, and a barely-conceived state apparatus, we instead spend our time with I. and her “cute” clone baby isolated in an apartment. That the child is “so cute” is mentioned a gratingly excessive number of times. This novel would benefit from some heavy editing. Well, like, every page has at least one sentence that begins with “well,” and is spliced with “like”; random words are made into proper nouns that do not need to be Proper Nouns; and the narrator ends statement after statement with a question mark? The narrative style is intriguing at first but once it’s clear that there is no plot, stumbling through the strange narrative affect becomes arduous and irritating. You wish that the book would just get to the point, the twist, the heart-wrenching moment, but it never does.