#OH IM OBSESSED WITH THE CLAY SECTION

[ufonaut]

Are there things you cannot possibly explain? Are strange things happening to you? These four may be your last hope!

The Challengers of the Unknown section on the DC Comics website from July 1997.

Transcripts under the cut:

INTRO:

Step into The Light...

CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN

The scene: A jumbo jetliner crashes in the Rockies. In the aftermath, four lone survivors pull themselves from the wreckage and are instantly transfixed by a mysterious bright light bathing the disaster site. The light, growing brighter and brighter by the second, "sings" to them, envelops them, until it is all... until it is everything!

After the accident, race car driver Clay Brody, theoretical physicist Brenda Ruskin, game designer Kenn Kawa, and pilot Marlon Corbet go back to their lives - lives which now seem shallow and unreal. In the weeks that follow the strange occurrence, each is haunted by recurring dreams of the crash and its aftermath, blindly unaware of the changes that have taken place - altering their lives forever!

The four are unexpectedly reunited by Sands, an elderly gentleman with a very special power: the ability to recognize others who have also been touched by The Light. The mysterious benefactor makes them an intriguing offer: If they agree to band together to continue his work, he'll fund them, give them access to information he's gathered over the years, and help them develop their newfound powers. This could be the turning point.. the moment they've been waiting for: to seek the truth, explore the unexplainable... to challenge the unknown!

---

BRENDA RUSKIN:

Flamboyant in style, Ruskin is deeply passionate about her career and most other things in her life. Easily the smartest of the Challengers, she became one of the youngest theoretical physicist in history, working out the mysteries of quarks and dark matter, and her nerve and straightforwardness put her in demand on the lecture circuit. Her love life is less successful, and whereas Brody has no relationships, she has too many of them, with old boyfriends tending to pop up at the worst possible times. Her romances tend to be short-fused and burn out rapidly.

While she has no surviving family, she's ardent both in theorizing about the unknown and in placing those theories in the context of existing scientific knowledge, to make the unknown understandable, though she has a more liberal definition of understandable than most. Her innate empathy with technology seems somehow stronger since the incident that created the Challengers, but it doesn't unsettle her.

An only child pushed to excellence by parents at the expense of friends, Ruskin seeks companionship as much as knowledge from the Challengers. But the one she feels closest to is Kenn. Though she's serious about being friends with all of them; she's almost always at odds with Corbett, and finds Brody alternately arrogant and smothering, as if he can't believe she can take care of herself. Sparks of all kinds occasionally fly between her and all members of the group. She just loves the adventure and the sheer "unintellectuality" of the whole thing.

---

MARLON CORBETT:

Pilot, from Denver, CO. Marlon comes from a middle-class background with strong family values, including strong but not overbearing, traditional religious beliefs and a liberal political tradition. Though the urge that drove him to fly was to find something beyond all that.

Following a liberal arts college education, Corbett enlisted in the air force, and later became a civilian pilot. His family is large, supportive and tightly knit, he's probably the most eager of all the Challengers to dig into their mission, and easily the most lighthearted.

Of the four of them, Corbett has the most to lose by his involvement in the Challengers. His family and fiancee, (who's threatening to end their engagement), don't understand his involvement with "the occult" along with his willingness to abandon his job, and he's not even certain he understands it himself. The situation becomes a test of his family's strength.

Marlon has been troubled by unsettling dreams since the incident that created the Challengers. He disregards the feelings until he meets Sands and realizes they are all changed.

Because he has the strongest family life of the four of them, he is both the most supportive member of the group and apparently the most tenuous, since he has a life elsewhere. But he's tied to the group by the desire to be something more than what he has been, to not be just a member of his family or of a nondescript flight crew, but to stand out, to prove himself. the most easygoing of the group, he openly likes everyone, rising above their petty squabbles and frequently providing the viewpoint that lets the rest of the group rise above them, too.

His natural charm makes him a good front man for the group when they have to deal with the public or smooth the ruffled features of officials.

---

KENN KAWA:

The hardest to pigeonhole of all the Challengers, Kawa designs role-playing games for a living, and enjoys his skill at "playing" widely diverse characters. A firm believer in believing, his beliefs are equally mutable, tending toward wilder concepts; one week he'll espouse psychic surgery, the next primal scream therapy, the next Zen meditation. His family offers no clue to his true nature: his parents divorced, they and his sister are scattered across the globe, and he rarely sees them, though they exchange the usual birthday and holiday cards.

Unknown to anyone, he has an ex-wife and child, but prefers to keep them away from this part of his life. Kawa meanders through relationships with women, who tend to remain his friend rather than angry ex-lovers when he breaks up with them. But Kawa has constants: loyalty, an active practical imagination, an eye for details, a zest for new possibilities - and the ability to keep a secret.

Certain aspects of his fluid character are affecting his everyday life since the incident that created the Challengers, but he welcomes it, embracing anything new as a positive change in his being. Kawa enjoys periodically changing the direction of his life, so the Challengers come at the right time for him. There's little malicious about Kawa, but he delights in testing, seeing how far things can be pushed before he has to go a different way, and this is his chance to test reality. He "tests" his fellow Challengers as well, constantly challenging their preconceptions; he's the most open to the unknown of all of them. He particularly pushes Ruskin's buttons, triggered by her hot temper and her subtle claims to intellectual superiority, but underneath it all they enjoy each others company.

---

CLAY BRODY:

Race car driver, from Pikeville KY. Coming from a coal mining family, Brody is solid and dependable, but his childhood also left him with a taste for risk, and beating it. His father is dead, his mother and his three sisters have never left KY; and since a wild period in his teens when they wrote him off as bad, he hasn't dealt with any of them.

He's very methodological, believing only in what he can see, feel, plan or strategize. Even following his encounter with The Light, Brody resists acceptance of the paranormal and particularly of the spiritual, viewing everything with a skeptical, grounded eye. But, even he cannot deny that his experience during the incident that created the Challengers has changed him, and that change frightens him the more he understands it. Until he meets Sands, and learns the others have been similarly changed, he thinks he's going crazy.

While pleasant enough toward the others, and far from hostile, Brody is guarded around them, determined to find rational explanations for what they investigate, to ground the group in what he perceives as reality. In many ways, he's their anchor. He stays with the Challengers due to a secret need for a family he never really had, but learned behavior with his own family gets in the way. What the others mistake for occasional arrogance is actually shyness. He's rarely without black driving gloves, not really for his image, he wears them to guard himself from... something.

[comprosedreviews-blog]

Wednesday with THE FIFTH WAVE

The Fifth Wave

My Rating: ***/5

Sometimes I think I might be the last human on Earth… you know. To read The Fifth Wave.

If you didn’t get that joke (and yes smart asses in the back that does technically, probably, count as a joke) then you probably didn’t read the book, so beware the spoilery section to follow.

Anyway, that’s me. The girl who claims to be an avid reader of YA fantasy/ dystopian/ sci-fi that missed out on this really big book that everyone loved. Monica Uzpen. Not Monica like Lewinsky, or like from friends, Monica like the Monica from a really old TV show called Touched by an Angel. (You guys got that one right? I’m funny, right???).

Okay, this is all beside the point. The point being the review. SO let’s review.

Since I am so late to the party with the fifth wave I did a little research about it. Like, was it really worthy of all the YAYS and WOWS it got, or after the many waves (hehehehe) of praise it received, did it fail to meet others expectations. The answer was a mixture of yesses and nos, but what I found really interesting was that people who didn’t like the book, didn’t just not like the book, they hated it.

I’m here to tell you that I actually liked it. A lot. But it very clearly had its issues, and most of those revolved around the romance.

If you’ve read any of my reviews where I’ve ranted about relationships, then you know I HATE an unhealthy relationship with a quick insta-love feel. While I think insta-love might not be the exact wording for what went on between the love interest and MC, I can say it did feel pretty damn close, and that what resulted from that… relationship… felt TOTALLY unhealthy, at least for a good chunk of it. Please, especially if you are a young reader reading this book, understand that the relationship depicted within these pages is not one you’d want to put yourself in. I’ll explain why in the spoiler section, but know that there are some really unacceptable things that happen that are passed off as acceptable, and for that reason I docked this rating two stars.

BUT-BUT-BUT MONICA, if you really didn’t like the romance, how could you like the book????

Well you see, people who might be figuratively or literally asking this question either in reality or in my head because I’m that person who talks to herself and the voices in her head, the book itself was written beautifully. Hilariously. And there are SO MANY QUOTES that I just want to fling at you guys.

Sometimes in my tent, late at night, I think I hear the stars scraping against the sky.

Before I found you, I thought the only way to hold on was to find something to live for. It isn’t. To hold on you have to find something you’re willing to die for.

We are the clay, and you are Michelangelo. And we will be your masterpieces.

These are just SOME of the beautiful things I read, and to get a really real feeling of appreciation for them, you just gotta read the book. Because things loop. They loop and they complete themselves and they tie together and it’s just so damn satisfying every time it happens.

And you’re in for lots of contemplation and laughs if you do choose to pick it up.

Lol, I say this like you haven’t already.

Like I’m not the last human to read this book.

How ignorant of me ;)

~~~~~Anywho, that’s it for the non-spoilery section.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~If you choose to keep reading you are going to spoil yourself, and I advise against it if you haven’t read the book.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~Cool? Get it? Spoilers ahead!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Close your eyes. Are they closed? Really? Because that was dumb. How are you supposed to read this with your eyes closed. Figuratively, close your eyes. Picture a room. You are waking up in said room. You have been shot, undressed, and dressed and bathed by a complete stranger. After only a little bit of warming up to this person of the opposite sex, they kiss you. You tell them not to. They do it again. You threaten them if they do it again. Guess what? They do it again—

I’m sorry, how is this not sexual assault? We all know that no means no right? Like, I get that Rick Yancey was trying to do the whole, Cassie is a hard ass thing, but like… GUYS. That was assault. If he wanted us to like the dude he should have stopped and been like, YIKES SORRY IM A DICK, and then she could have explained what she meant. But as it was… IT WAS PRETTY MUCH RAPE.

So why did I give this four stars. Because, yeah, it was clear that the character afterwards hadn’t meant what she said and that the author didn’t understand the HORRIBLE implication this could have on teenagers. Like, I’m sorry this is YA. Young people are going to read this with their little malleable minds and think this is okay. It’s not okay. Ever. End of story.

I seriously wish that scene wasn’t in the book. Without it I would have a clear conscious in liking it, with it I am torn between recommending it and hiding it away in a garbage bin. I cannot stress this enough, what happened in that scene was not romantic. It was not acceptable. It basically ruined the romance for me in the novel. Another thing was the amount of times Cassie abuse Evan. I mean this might be a kill or be killed world, but if you want to make me believe that these two characters are falling in love, please don’t have one of them punch the other several times in the chest. Okay? I don’t care that she’s a girl, being pounded repeatedly out of anger is going to hurt anyone. If you flip the roles and had Evan do the same to Cassie, would that be okay? No. People would gape in horror. Well it’s the same. She’s strong. She’s hurting him. Why can people so easily dismiss this as a case of ‘hysterics’? Sure she was contemplating killing him, but beating him up with her fists wasn’t going to get that done. She only did that when she was pretty sure she wouldn’t kill him. Just, these issues made it so hard to get behind them. So. Hard. Which sucks, because the author did some really great things to connect his characters together.

And those things were his ideas that linked into each other. The human clay quote that we see in Parish’s POV and then is echoed in Cassie’s, the cockroach metaphor that linked all three characters together, the idea of running or putting something off that linked Parish and Cassie. We saw similar themes in all of the character’s experiences and scenes, and each time I saw some form of repetition I couldn’t help but feel that tug the author was going for, the one that ended with all four of our principle characters ending in the same room just when they all needed to be there together.

My personal favorite motif that linked his characters together was the chess motif. Over and over again we have Ringer saying that Parish should play chess, or that this and that is like chess, or check, or check and mate. She’s obsessed with strategy, and she’s wicked smart. Strangely enough, when she say’s to Parish, this is not chess, I didn’t feel like it was as much a growth on her part as a growth on his. Because before he had always said he didn’t care about chess, that he didn’t play. But right as she said that it was so easy to see how those words meant something different to him than they would have earlier, because he had given into the game a little bit. He had played the board, had moved like a pawn when expected too, tried to make the safe and sure moves, and when she recommends that they don’t for the first time, we can see the transformation that had slowly taken over Parish, and we could see Parish snapping back to himself.

Oh yeah, this book has a LOT of repetition. Motifs, like the cold stars and the cockroaches and the last human and humanity as a concept, and chess popped up a dizzying amount of times. Sentences were repeated back to back—same words and ideas, just inverted for special affect. And sentence patterns were established—whole paragraphs began with the same word or ended with the same phrase. And yeah, this can be annoying AF to some readers, but I loved this. Why? It was interesting.

It read like a real person’s thoughts to me. It read like what I would be thinking if I came face to face with something trying to kill me. With the idea of inevitable death. The repetition read as nervous energy, nervous thought. It wasn’t unintelligent thought, just nervous. Anxious, and sure a little sarcastic, but also real.

I mean I’m sorry, but if I was all alone in a world that was being programmed to murder me in twelve thousand different painful ways I think I would also be hung up on myself being a cockroach or about the little stuffed bear that keeps me company. I’d certainly have a lot of time to think about each of these thoughts.

But let’s back up and talk about some of the stuff these characters faced.

So what I really liked about this book was the way that the scary stuff felt both present and separate from us reader folk. MONICA, WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN BY THAT? Take the plague, my impatient theoretical questioners. The plague was a looming threat, but it didn’t threaten our main characters. Anymore. As far as we knew. And yet Rick Yancey continued to bring it into play. Held it over our heads throughout the book. THOSE DUMB BIRDS kept appearing, and every time we saw one there was an unwritten (okay, occasionally written) threat that it was carrying a horrible killing disease. Sure, sure, Cassie and Sammy and everyone already survived the plague. They have nothing to worry about. Right? Haha… right? WRONG. I couldn’t quite trust the idea that the third wave was over just yet. And that’s because more victims kept popping up. Time wise, they were contained, but rate of revelation wise, not so much. We learn Cassie’s mom dies of the plague. Okay, cool, but they survived. We’re safe. NOT—because now there’s this other character, Parish, dying of the plague right in front of us readers… oh wait no he survives too, okay so we’re really actually safe this time—BUT WAIT NO this kid named Evan lost like all of his siblings to this damn plague WTF this is too real and its being carried by birds and omg there are fricken buzzards EVERYWHERE WE ARE ALL DOOMED.

But you could also forget about that looming threat because it isn’t really a threat anymore, right, right? Even though the plague functioned as a weapon pre present day book, there was still a kill count that we as readers had to uncover, and the more we learned about it, the more real it became. And even though I knew they were safe from it not too far in, the author made it easy for us to remember this horrific disease wasn’t too far into the past. That the repercussions of it still exist. That there are more horrific things to come. Hence it being present and separate. I think that was skillfully done on Yancey’s part. It made the threat that the characters felt, easily transferable to the reader.

And omg. What was also transferable to the reader? The paranoia. So much. Paranoia.

Specifically involving Evan. I felt like a fricken lunatic right alongside Cassie. Right off the bat I was like, Oh, Evan is clearly the silencer. Okay. But then we get the pictures, we get the house and the bread and the burgers and the chocolate and I’m starting to think, no. No way. This guy who’s trying to talk alien conspiracies with Cassie can’t be an alien. This is all in Cassie’s head. And mine. And what???

And of course, he’s the silencer. I knew 100% he was when she held that gun up to him, and probably 88% when we smelled the gunpowder on his hands, but still the fact that the author could make me go from being absolutely certain of the truth to doubting myself when it was SO OBVIOUS, astounds me. And makes me love the book more. Not enough to forgive the romance and make it four or five stars, but enough to be impressed.

I didn’t really feel the same back and forth about whether or not Wright Patterson was run by aliens. I figured it was because things were too convenient for them. They had electricity. They didn’t care about the noise they made. They killed lots of people… blah blah blah. I did wonder about how many people were aliens. I briefly thought that the drill sergeant was human, because no. He was not just a caricature of torturous evil. If he is then he has to be human. And the whole part where he’s pounding Parish’s chest, telling him that they have to kill the aliens felt so genuine. That they have to find the fight. I was like. Yeah. Yeah! You have to find the fight! Fight!!!!!!!!!

I did start to sway a little on who was an alien and who wasn’t. I thought, maybe they don’t know they’re being played. Maybe most of them think they’re all human. And for a time I wholeheartedly believed that the only evil guy in the camp was Vosch.

And let’s be real, we all knew he was evil, right? There was never any doubt. A character doesn’t get to kill a bunch of people, and in the same page as explaining away his mass murder of a bunch of people because… yaknow… fear, be described as convincing enough to get one of our main characters to commit suicide if he asked and NOT be an alien trying to wipe out humanity. I’m sorry, if a character ever says something like, I’d shoot myself in the head without question if so-and-so asked, you know that so-and-so is one of the baddiest of baddies.

It’s just common sense.

And this seems to be the common sense place to end this review.

See you in two weeks,

And happy love of reading day,

Monica