So, I’ve heard a lot of things about this novel. That it’s a quick read, that it’s melodramatic, that Wells is boring, that the whole thing is one long piece of Bellarke fanfiction. The conclusion I’ve drawn from it is that it’s a big hot mess, so naturally I forked out twelve bucks and bought it so I could live blog the whole thing.
So, for your convenience, this is: a recap of The 100, by Kass Morgan! Read this, so you don’t have to fork out twelve bucks, too. I care about your budgets.
One thing I should let everyone know before I begin: I own the “TV” version of this book, meaning it’s the edition released after the show came out, with the actors and CW logo and everything. And guess what: Finn is on the cover of this book. He is not a character in this book. He has prime territory, too – right in the middle, behind Clarke. Bellamy and Wells, who actually exist, and are main characters, are hanging out on the edges (of the cover and also society!!! Get it. Ha.) because, I don’t know, whoever designed this cover is stupid.
So, for your convenience, this is: a recap of The 100, by Kass Morgan! Read this, so you don’t have to fork out twelve bucks, too. I care about your budgets.
One thing I should let everyone know before I begin: I own the “TV” version of this book, meaning it’s the edition released after the show came out, with the actors and CW logo and everything. And guess what: Finn is on the cover of this book. He is not a character in this book. He has prime territory, too – right in the middle, behind Clarke. Bellamy and Wells, who actually exist, and are main characters, are hanging out on the edges (of the cover and also society!!! Get it. Ha.) because, I don’t know, whoever designed this cover is stupid.
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| IN CASE YOU CANNOT TELL, THAT IS WELLS UP THERE IN THE CORNER. BECAUSE THEY MAKE IT SORT OF DIFFICULT. |
Like, you can’t even see Wells’ entire head. Just like, part of his face, and the rest of it is cut off by the top right corner. He only has one eye. I’m just – so disgruntled about this. It’s not enough that you kill him off for no reason but you can’t even give him enough room to have a complete profile? He’s a main character. Fuck off with this bullshit. What the hell. It’s a small thing but it isn’t, you know.
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| *sighs heavily* |
I'm so weary of this kind of shit already I'm just going to assume that you all know my intense feelings of "this is fucking bullshit" and move on.
Chapter one opens with one of the most “creative writing class prompt” lines I’ve ever seen in a book:
Chapter one opens with one of the most “creative writing class prompt” lines I’ve ever seen in a book:
The door slid open, and Clarke knew it was time to die.
Can’t you just see that on a list of sentences handed out by a twelfth grade English teacher? “Use them as a starting point,” they probably said, “a way to jumpstart your story,” and Kass Morgan nods, thinking, yes. This is good. What an amazing way to capture people’s attention. What door? Where? Why is she going to die? How does she know for certain? Is Clarke a man’s name or a woman’s? So many good questions. A+, Kass!
Like, the first sentence of your story is fucking hard to come up with, I know that better than anyone, but seriously. Come on.
So, we’re in a prison, we find that out fairly quickly, mostly due to Morgan’s exposition, and actually you know what, Clarke comes off as way more bad ass in the first three paragraphs of this book than she did in the entire first episode of the show. She’s been transferred to solitary for attacking a guard, for example, and also, she seems to be having hallucinations, and this apparently happens regularly enough that this is like, ho hum, old hat, just a regular old day:
She heard voices everywhere. They called to her from the corners of her dark cell. They filled the silence between her heartbeats. They screamed from the deepest recesses of her mind. It wasn’t death she craved, but if that was the only way to silence the voices, then she was prepared to die.
Heavy, dude. I’m a little concerned about Clarke’s health considering she can a) hear her own heartbeats and b) there’s enough time in-between them that she has enough time to get bored apparently, but whatever. She’s a teenager in prison, wracked with guilt for a mysterious reason, I’m assuming that this is a character choice and not Morgan writing her novel like a MySpace post of a scene kid in the suburbs. It’s only chapter one, I’m keeping an open mind.
Also, hallucinations. Hallucinations. She hears voices!! This is very concerning to me. Not just because hey, I’m worried about you Clarke, do you need medical assistance? but also—keeping someone in solitary confinement to the point where they become touch starved (Clarke thinks about how she hasn’t been touched by another human in months, a couple paragraphs from now) and start hearing voices is definitely against the Geneva Convention, I’m thinking. Yup, totally healthy society, here. I have no problems with this at all.
So Morgan explains that Clarke’s been Confined (capital, so we know it’s important and official and ominous) for treason, but that’s not her real crime, her real crime is something much worse and much more mysterious that we won’t find out until the emotional climax of the novel, probably, because “her memories are more oppressive than any cell walls,” okay, sure. Her visitor is a guard, whom Clarke deducts is probably from the Walden or Arcadia colonies (the wrong side of the Ark tracks) because…he’s thin and people there are starving. Also he seems like he feels bad for her. Maybe he just has a conscience? You don’t have to be poor and oppressed to feel weird about condemning children to death, Clarke. Just a thought.
So the guard handcuffs Clarke, regretfully, which we know because his tone is brusque but also sympathetic, which is a description that made my brain short out the longer I tried to imagine what that sounds like exactly, and reminds Clarke of Thalia, her old cell mate who I’m assuming will show up later. Clarke assumes that he’s there to kill her, and then it’s more exposition, explaining that adults are killed instantly upon conviction, and juveniles are Confined according to Colony law (everything Important and Official is in Capital Letters) and given one last chance to make their case. But lately, they’ve just been killing everybody, even for crimes that would have been pardoned before (because the Ark is dying, but we’re not supposed to know that yet. I think).
Blah blah, some stuff about how she’d been hoping to walk past the hospital one last time where she’d done her apprenticeship because this is very tragic, all this would’ve been more interesting if I hadn’t seen the show first, probably.
Another mention of Thalia, and another former cell mate Lise, who we know is going to be bad because Clarke remembers that she’d been “hard-faced” and smiled in malicious glee when they’d carted Clarke off to solitary. The malicious glee part is mine, by the way – I’m just connecting dots, man, just connecting dots.
Then in comes Dr. Lahiri, and then it’s more exposition. He’s the Council’s chief medical advisor (North American spelling there, as opposed to “adviser,” which is more common in the UK, hmm, should’ve used a Britspeak beta, Morgan), and he was friends with her dad, and Clarke worked with him closely during her apprenticeship. People were jealous of her, because she’s the main character, and accused her of nepotism since Lahiri was friends with her dad, who apparently was executed, along with her mother.
Another thing: in the book, they give people a lethal injection to kill them, then dump their body into space. This seems infinitely less cruel than the TV show, where your family members get to watch your face from behind a glass wall as you get sucked out of an airlock fully conscious. Yup, that makes sense. This society isn’t inhuman and severely messed up at all.
I already don’t like this doctor guy. His conversation with Clarke reads like the quintessential scene in every “main character wakes up in a hospital and is told their entire plot has been a hallucination” episode, where the doctor sits down and is nice and condescending and tells Buffy Summers or Elizabeth Weir that she’s hurting herself and her family by continuing to live in a fantasy world. I’m on guard immediately. He’s not a friend, Clarke! He’s a Replicator! The apocalypse is coming, you need to wake up!
Also, hallucinations. Hallucinations. She hears voices!! This is very concerning to me. Not just because hey, I’m worried about you Clarke, do you need medical assistance? but also—keeping someone in solitary confinement to the point where they become touch starved (Clarke thinks about how she hasn’t been touched by another human in months, a couple paragraphs from now) and start hearing voices is definitely against the Geneva Convention, I’m thinking. Yup, totally healthy society, here. I have no problems with this at all.
So Morgan explains that Clarke’s been Confined (capital, so we know it’s important and official and ominous) for treason, but that’s not her real crime, her real crime is something much worse and much more mysterious that we won’t find out until the emotional climax of the novel, probably, because “her memories are more oppressive than any cell walls,” okay, sure. Her visitor is a guard, whom Clarke deducts is probably from the Walden or Arcadia colonies (the wrong side of the Ark tracks) because…he’s thin and people there are starving. Also he seems like he feels bad for her. Maybe he just has a conscience? You don’t have to be poor and oppressed to feel weird about condemning children to death, Clarke. Just a thought.
So the guard handcuffs Clarke, regretfully, which we know because his tone is brusque but also sympathetic, which is a description that made my brain short out the longer I tried to imagine what that sounds like exactly, and reminds Clarke of Thalia, her old cell mate who I’m assuming will show up later. Clarke assumes that he’s there to kill her, and then it’s more exposition, explaining that adults are killed instantly upon conviction, and juveniles are Confined according to Colony law (everything Important and Official is in Capital Letters) and given one last chance to make their case. But lately, they’ve just been killing everybody, even for crimes that would have been pardoned before (because the Ark is dying, but we’re not supposed to know that yet. I think).
Blah blah, some stuff about how she’d been hoping to walk past the hospital one last time where she’d done her apprenticeship because this is very tragic, all this would’ve been more interesting if I hadn’t seen the show first, probably.
Another mention of Thalia, and another former cell mate Lise, who we know is going to be bad because Clarke remembers that she’d been “hard-faced” and smiled in malicious glee when they’d carted Clarke off to solitary. The malicious glee part is mine, by the way – I’m just connecting dots, man, just connecting dots.
Then in comes Dr. Lahiri, and then it’s more exposition. He’s the Council’s chief medical advisor (North American spelling there, as opposed to “adviser,” which is more common in the UK, hmm, should’ve used a Britspeak beta, Morgan), and he was friends with her dad, and Clarke worked with him closely during her apprenticeship. People were jealous of her, because she’s the main character, and accused her of nepotism since Lahiri was friends with her dad, who apparently was executed, along with her mother.
Another thing: in the book, they give people a lethal injection to kill them, then dump their body into space. This seems infinitely less cruel than the TV show, where your family members get to watch your face from behind a glass wall as you get sucked out of an airlock fully conscious. Yup, that makes sense. This society isn’t inhuman and severely messed up at all.
I already don’t like this doctor guy. His conversation with Clarke reads like the quintessential scene in every “main character wakes up in a hospital and is told their entire plot has been a hallucination” episode, where the doctor sits down and is nice and condescending and tells Buffy Summers or Elizabeth Weir that she’s hurting herself and her family by continuing to live in a fantasy world. I’m on guard immediately. He’s not a friend, Clarke! He’s a Replicator! The apocalypse is coming, you need to wake up!
“You’re still seventeen, Clarke,” Dr. Lahiri said in the calm, slow manner he usually reserved for patients waking up from surgery. “You’ve been in solitary for three months.”
“Then what are you doing here?” she asked, unable to quell the panic creeping into her voice. “The law says you have to wait until I’m eighteen.”
“There’s been a change of plans. That’s all I’m authorized to say.”
“So you’re authorized to execute me but not to talk to me?”
YEAH, fight the Man, Clarke. I’m into this.
She remembered watching Dr. Lahiri during her parents’ trial. At the time, she’d read his grim face as an expression of his disapproval with the proceedings, but now she wasn’t sure. He hadn’t spoken up in their defense. No one had. He’d simply sat there mutely as the Council found her parents—two of Phoenix’s most brilliant scientists—to be in violation of the Gaia Doctrine, the rules established after the Cataclysm to ensure the survival of the human race. “What about my parents? Did you kill them too?”
Dr. Lahiri closed his eyes, as if Clarke’s words had transformed from sounds into something visible. Something grotesque.
lol what, that is the laziest way of using that stylistic trope ever. “Something visible. Something grotesque.” You know, the thing about using this method of giving physical descriptions to words in order to describe their emotional impact? Is that you have to actually pick a physical description. You can’t just be like: “it was gross-looking.” The creative writing class must have covered “show, don’t tell,” right?
“Clarke’s words had transformed from sounds into something visible. Something like Wells’s mutilated face, scrunched into the corner of the book cover in favour of the white dude who isn’t even in this story. Like mild racism, they made Dr. Lahiri recoil in pained disgust.” There, see? Done.
Also the British spelling is throwing me off—“defense,” and in an earlier paragraph, a reference to Clarke’s family’s “flat.” Is this an effort to demonstrate a blended, multicultural society or did Kass Morgan become one of those annoying Anglophiles when she was at Oxford and decided to write her book like an English person? I’m an American living in New Zealand, and I understand picking up local patterns of speaking, but they don’t become so ingrained that you accidentally use them in a novel years after you’ve moved home. Come on, now.
Anyway, so Dr. Lahiri keeps up the condescending “teenagers are friends, not food” act and proceeds to give her a fucking panic attack, because his generosity doesn’t extend to explaining what he’s going to do to her before he does it, even though he’s aware she thinks he’s there to murder her.
“Clarke’s words had transformed from sounds into something visible. Something like Wells’s mutilated face, scrunched into the corner of the book cover in favour of the white dude who isn’t even in this story. Like mild racism, they made Dr. Lahiri recoil in pained disgust.” There, see? Done.
Also the British spelling is throwing me off—“defense,” and in an earlier paragraph, a reference to Clarke’s family’s “flat.” Is this an effort to demonstrate a blended, multicultural society or did Kass Morgan become one of those annoying Anglophiles when she was at Oxford and decided to write her book like an English person? I’m an American living in New Zealand, and I understand picking up local patterns of speaking, but they don’t become so ingrained that you accidentally use them in a novel years after you’ve moved home. Come on, now.
Anyway, so Dr. Lahiri keeps up the condescending “teenagers are friends, not food” act and proceeds to give her a fucking panic attack, because his generosity doesn’t extend to explaining what he’s going to do to her before he does it, even though he’s aware she thinks he’s there to murder her.
Dr. Lahiri reached into his coat pocket and produced a cloth that smelled of antiseptic. Clarke shivered as he swept it along the inside of her arm. “Don’t worry. This isn’t going to hurt.”
Clarke closed her eyes.
She remembered the anguished look Wells had given her as the guards were escorting her out of the Council chambers. While the anger that had threatened to consume her during the trial had long since burned out, thinking about Wells sent a new wave of heat pulsing through her body, like a dying star emitting one final flash of light before it faded into nothingness.
Her parents were dead, and it was all his fault.
Clarke is striking me as something she really isn’t in the show: wronged. I’m on page seven and I’m feeling more self-righteous, justified anger and bitterness about what the Ark did to her family than I did in the entire first season of the show. I like this Clarke much better, tbh, she feels much more human than show!Clarke, who’s got a serious case of ‘main character syndrome’—namely, she’s bland. She’s Zoey in Zoey 101. She’s special because she’s the lead, duh, why do you need any other reason? (Well, yeah. Some kind of reason I don’t have to dig between the lines for would be nice.)
So Lahiri doesn’t kill her, of course, he just puts the wristband on her. Because of course, how else would you go about it, when your traumatized former protégé thinks you’re there to inject her with poison, other than to act like you’re about to give her an injection? Good job, Doctor.
So Lahiri doesn’t kill her, of course, he just puts the wristband on her. Because of course, how else would you go about it, when your traumatized former protégé thinks you’re there to inject her with poison, other than to act like you’re about to give her an injection? Good job, Doctor.
“Just relax,” he said with infuriating coolness. “It’s a vital transponder. It will track your breathing and blood composition, and gather all sorts of useful information.”
“Useful information for who?” Clarke asked, although she could already feel the shape of his answer in the growing mass of dread in her stomach.
That makes it sound like she might have a tumor of some kind. I have a feeling from these descriptions that Kass Morgan used to write fanfiction. Or maybe Clarke did. It’s too early to tell.
Also: the wristbands apparently stay on through tiny needles that stay injected into the skin, which sounds absolutely fucking horrifying, and throws that scene where Bellamy is holding Clarke over the edge of the pit by her wristband-hand into a really painful light. Shit, that must’ve hurt a lot.
Also: the wristbands apparently stay on through tiny needles that stay injected into the skin, which sounds absolutely fucking horrifying, and throws that scene where Bellamy is holding Clarke over the edge of the pit by her wristband-hand into a really painful light. Shit, that must’ve hurt a lot.
“There’ve been some exciting developments,” Dr. Lahiri said, sounding like a hollow imitation of Wells’s father, Chancellor Jaha, making one of his Remembrance Day speeches. “You should be very proud. It’s all because of your parents.”
If Morgan’s intention is to make me think that the Ark is some horrifying future space-version of Stepford, then congrats, because this is some creepy ass shit. Citizens who hollowly imitate their leader’s propaganda when asked direct, challenging questions is definitely a sign of a healthy society.
“My parents were executed for treason.”
Dr. Lahiri gave her a disapproving look.
GO JUMP OFF A BRIDGE, LAHIRI.
“Don’t ruin this, Clarke. You have a chance to do the right thing, to make up for your parents’ appalling crime.”
Punch this fucker in the face, Clarke. Do it.
There was a dull crack as Clarke’s fist made contact with the doctor’s face, followed by a thud as his head slammed against the wall.
awww yeeeeah. You are the voice of the people, Clarke. I definitely like you better than your show counterpart.
Anyway, the guard obviously feels the same because he takes his sweet time to pop his head in and say “yo doc, u dead?” so clearly this guy is a revolutionary in disguise. Who else but a master of deception can manage to sound brusque and sympathetic at the same time? Maybe he’s the Mockingjay.
Anyway, Lahiri is an ass and does that gross thing that dudes do when they get hit by women, where they’re pissed off but also amused, because haha, ladies don’t hit people, you silly lady, you’re so silly. Then he makes a crack about Clarke fitting in with the other delinquents and tells her that she’s going to Earth (while smirking; super professional), because apparently when he told Clarke three pages ago that he wasn’t authorized to tell her anything, he was totes lying because he’s a sick fuck who gets off on giving teenagers near death experiences. He’s clearly a serial killer, okay.
Anyway, the chapter ends here. I think my recap is actually longer than the chapter itself. I’m strangely at peace with that.
So interesting things we learned: the Gaia Doctrine is what they call their Constitution, which sorta fucks up my headcanon of Bellamy and Clarke naming their daughter that, boo. The station that Clarke is from is called Phoenix, and this version of the Ark seems to be a lot more attached to philosophy and rhetoric, since all three of the stations that have been named so far have a lot of literary/mythological connotations. Phoenix is obvious, of course, and I think most people know Gaia was a Greek Earth goddess, but Walden is probably a reference to the book by Henry David Thoreau, which is the favored manifesto of every hipster anti-capitalist Christopher McCandless “nature solves your problems” devotee, and Arcadia is a Greek province and the dryest fucking thing I've ever read, a book by Sir Philip Sidney called The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Don't talk to me about that book, I had to write a forty-page paper on it when I was nineteen, I still have fucking nightmares.
Anyway all you need to know is that Arcadia is another word for utopia, and specifically, a pastoral one. It's where Pan lived. Virgil’s Eclogues are set there. Walden is the American wild paradise, and Arcadia is the ye olden day version of it, so pairing these two names together, for the pair of oppressed colonies, is no accident.
(A 16th century Italian explorer named the northeastern North American coast "Acadia." Walden is about Thoreau’s mental health vacation at Walden Pond, in Massachusetts. Kass Morgan went to Brown in Rhode Island, and the show’s setting is in future, post-apocalyptic Pennsylvania. Lurking somewhere in here is a lit paper on the American transcendentalism influences and the intersection between “utopia” and “dystopia” in this book, but someone else can take that on.)
They’re good references—historical-based allusions to the natural world, an ironic juxtaposition of the novel’s two settings (and concepts) Earth and Space, but not too heavy-handed, especially for a YA novel, whose target audience wouldn’t necessarily recognize them right off the bat. I actually like the detail, there, even if the show’s version of the Ark colony names—naming them after their trade, after what they can contribute to society—fits a bit better with the characterization of the Ark culture.
Furthermore the stylistic detail of using capitonyms, which is when you capitalize a word to change its meaning as Morgan does with words such as “Confined,” and “Colony,” is characteristic of religious and philosophical texts, which is pretty telling as well. The end result is that Ark culture is beginning to feel a lot like a cult, which is probably intentional. Kass Morgan was probably an English major, I’m thinking.
Also, an interesting tidbit nobody but me cares about, probably—Clarke mentions her father’s habit of forgetting to program the “circadian lights” in their “flat” and then staying up too late working. Also they use 24-hour time. This is more detail about the mundane aspects of living in space than we ever got on the show, which is the main reason I’m reading this book, so that’s a good.
Anyway, the guard obviously feels the same because he takes his sweet time to pop his head in and say “yo doc, u dead?” so clearly this guy is a revolutionary in disguise. Who else but a master of deception can manage to sound brusque and sympathetic at the same time? Maybe he’s the Mockingjay.
Anyway, Lahiri is an ass and does that gross thing that dudes do when they get hit by women, where they’re pissed off but also amused, because haha, ladies don’t hit people, you silly lady, you’re so silly. Then he makes a crack about Clarke fitting in with the other delinquents and tells her that she’s going to Earth (while smirking; super professional), because apparently when he told Clarke three pages ago that he wasn’t authorized to tell her anything, he was totes lying because he’s a sick fuck who gets off on giving teenagers near death experiences. He’s clearly a serial killer, okay.
Anyway, the chapter ends here. I think my recap is actually longer than the chapter itself. I’m strangely at peace with that.
So interesting things we learned: the Gaia Doctrine is what they call their Constitution, which sorta fucks up my headcanon of Bellamy and Clarke naming their daughter that, boo. The station that Clarke is from is called Phoenix, and this version of the Ark seems to be a lot more attached to philosophy and rhetoric, since all three of the stations that have been named so far have a lot of literary/mythological connotations. Phoenix is obvious, of course, and I think most people know Gaia was a Greek Earth goddess, but Walden is probably a reference to the book by Henry David Thoreau, which is the favored manifesto of every hipster anti-capitalist Christopher McCandless “nature solves your problems” devotee, and Arcadia is a Greek province and the dryest fucking thing I've ever read, a book by Sir Philip Sidney called The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Don't talk to me about that book, I had to write a forty-page paper on it when I was nineteen, I still have fucking nightmares.
Anyway all you need to know is that Arcadia is another word for utopia, and specifically, a pastoral one. It's where Pan lived. Virgil’s Eclogues are set there. Walden is the American wild paradise, and Arcadia is the ye olden day version of it, so pairing these two names together, for the pair of oppressed colonies, is no accident.
(A 16th century Italian explorer named the northeastern North American coast "Acadia." Walden is about Thoreau’s mental health vacation at Walden Pond, in Massachusetts. Kass Morgan went to Brown in Rhode Island, and the show’s setting is in future, post-apocalyptic Pennsylvania. Lurking somewhere in here is a lit paper on the American transcendentalism influences and the intersection between “utopia” and “dystopia” in this book, but someone else can take that on.)
They’re good references—historical-based allusions to the natural world, an ironic juxtaposition of the novel’s two settings (and concepts) Earth and Space, but not too heavy-handed, especially for a YA novel, whose target audience wouldn’t necessarily recognize them right off the bat. I actually like the detail, there, even if the show’s version of the Ark colony names—naming them after their trade, after what they can contribute to society—fits a bit better with the characterization of the Ark culture.
Furthermore the stylistic detail of using capitonyms, which is when you capitalize a word to change its meaning as Morgan does with words such as “Confined,” and “Colony,” is characteristic of religious and philosophical texts, which is pretty telling as well. The end result is that Ark culture is beginning to feel a lot like a cult, which is probably intentional. Kass Morgan was probably an English major, I’m thinking.
Also, an interesting tidbit nobody but me cares about, probably—Clarke mentions her father’s habit of forgetting to program the “circadian lights” in their “flat” and then staying up too late working. Also they use 24-hour time. This is more detail about the mundane aspects of living in space than we ever got on the show, which is the main reason I’m reading this book, so that’s a good.
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