Blood Zero Sky

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

What Blood Zero Sky has going for it is excellent world building. J. Gabriel Gates paints a futuristic world where corporate greed has completely taken over vividly and with disturbing detail. The first couple of pages are suffocating. Not only that, but its clever too, particularly with vernacular (“by the way,” is replaced with “sidebar” which I thought was pretty cute). The fact that the dominant company, N-Corp, based itself out of Nabisco I think is pretty poignant considering that it was quite recent that many conservatives got a wakeup call when they proposed boycotting Nabisco due to its new stance on gay rights, but would've (if they did some research, which honestly I don't know how many did) found that its actually near impossible. The world that's painted here is one of constant entertainment and constant work and constant need for the next big thing when you're already in unimaginable debt. It effectively illustrated what it truly means to be owned and not only never know it, but love it.

The other thing that's done well is rhetoric. Gates would make a fabulous speech writer. Whether its the Protectorate's charismatic general, Ethan Greene, riling up the troops, or the Reverend Jimmy Shaw spewing hate and fear in the form of faith and love, the dialogue in this book is extremely convincing.

That's pretty much what those two stars consist of, because the rest was a whole lot of nothing. The first big problem lies with the main character, May Fields. When the book opened, I got the distinct impression that Gates was trying a bit too hard to create a nihilistic voice, one that is overly aware and trendily apathetic about the world around her. May seems to know that there's a lot wrong with her world, but she benefits from it so she doesn't complain. This overwhelming ennui eventually slacks off, so you'd think I'd feel better about it. But I couldn't, because it runs off into a whole big mess. May Fields was going in so many directions I couldn't even keep track of her. One second she's our nihilist hero, the next she's a God-fearing devotee of the company, the next she's entertaining the thought of rebellion for a pretty face. In short, she lacked conviction, and when you're telling a story about rebellion and dying for a cause, that is a big freaking deal. Her lack of focus kept me from really getting into the story, and all the emotional investment that was needed to carry the second half of the book just wasn't there for me.

Oh and to add salt to the wound, as this was an unedited e-ARC, there were bound to be mistakes. This one sadly had a rather massive continuity error in which a big reveal happened twice. Whoops. And the timing of said reveal has pretty a big impact on May's mindset and development, so yeah, that definitely took me out of the moment.

So. Now that I've gotten all that stuff out of the way Imma take my earrings out and get mad about this cracks knuckles. Because this book made me mad. I'm mad about how a book about insurgency against a totalitarian corporate entity not unlike what we're experiencing today is dominated by white characters. I'm mad that the one adult black character is referred to as “exotic” at one point. I'm mad that rape was used as a plot device for a male character, but otherwise has little bearing on the character development of the female character who was actually raped. I'm mad that one of the ways May is painted as a special little snowflake is by noting how many sets of fake breasts she sees. And it makes me incredibly mad this revolution Gates' portrayed is founded in the voice of institutions like government and the military and even religion. When a child tells the May, as they march to their deaths “God bless you, and god bless America” it took everything in me not to throw my Kindle.



The roots of insurrection do not lay in institutions. It's not something that you can buy, or claim through nationalism, or even learn in school. It's something that grows from being labeled by said establishment as an Other, it is in the markings of being stepped on. There's no glory in that fight because its one that should never have to be fought. Really, May Fields should know this. She may be of privilege (like many protagonists in dystopian settings, effectively creating a kyriarchal white savior), but she's a queer woman who had her first love stolen from her along with her ability to express herself as who she is. She was raped by squadmen who prance around throughout the entire book, flaunting their right to abuse their authority. This stuff isn't strange, it's not reserved for fiction. It happens all the time, though not nearly as often to the daughters of CEOs. These are the kinds of stories that fuel rage, that get molotov cocktails thrown, yet all we get from May is a few twinges of anxiety at the sight of authorities that have abused and used her. It's not until she's effectively given permission – she's absorbed into the Protectorate and has the backing of two male characters (her relationships with the women she meets is much more shaky at first) – that she becomes more passionate.



The fact that May is a lesbian was really exciting for me at first. It seemed like a great opportunity to portray the defiance and rebellion of queerness, as opposed to the heteronormative perspective that dominates media. But ultimately it felt incredibly sanitized. May pined after her love the same way any airheaded YA heroine does after some boy she barely knows, and in May's case hers is in love with a man. As with much else she does, there was disconnect between her emotions and the events in her life because she waffled back and forth so much.

There's even a brief moment where, despite May expressing the satisfaction she feels of being in battle (“Though I can hardly admit it to myself, I am in love with war. The feeling of firing a gun, like holding thunder in my hand, is intoxicating. The power to kill compensates for all I've been deprived in my life”), she speaks of her wish for a nonviolent solution, invoking the name of Martin Luther King Jr. To which I declared “Oh hell no.”

Dr. King was not a gentle lamb who wanted us to hold hands and sing Kumbayah. Back in the day he was an Angry Black Man™ and a communist and a queer and everything else ‘bad' they could lobby at him. He was angry, angry about racism and war and poverty and sexism and homophobia and all the things that are swept under the rug when the same white Republicans who back then would have called him a traitor now mumble a few lines of the “I Have a Dream” speech once a year as if that makes their salty asses not racist.

Dr. King never thought that being a pacifist meant being passive. And now white people want to pass him off as some watered down civil rights leader who made white people realize that, oh, racism is kind of bad. - tumblr user piinboots

(ARC provided by NetGalley.com)