Living Hell by Catherine Jinks – Review

What if you and the people you knew were mankind’s last hope of surviving as a species, and you were being transported by a spaceship to some distant destination to become the seeds of a new beginning for humanity? Now, what if, like HAL, the AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke, your spaceship’s AI (or, in this case, its CAIP, or Core Artificial Intelligence Program), became sentient, alive, and didn’t need you around anymore? What if your spaceship thought of you as a virus inside of a living body, like the submarine that gets shrunk and injected into a human body in the movie Fantastic Voyage? How would you survive and make it to a new world to colonize it? This is the life and problems seventeen-year-old Cheney faces in Catherine Jinks’s latest YA SF novel, Living Hell.

One of the things that fans of SF look at when they’re judging the merits of one SF novel over another is if the author displays good world-building skills – does the author create a believable, and relatively original, world/universe for his/her characters to live in? Though Living Hell is Jinks’s first foray into the SF field, she’s an accomplished award-winning author of children’s and YA novels, and I’d say she does a pretty good job at world-building, though the “world” in this case is Plexus, the spaceship.  Cheney, his parents, his friends, an aggressive boy he mentors, Dygall, and around 1,400 other people live in and rely on this spaceship.

Life is sweet, albeit generally a little bland, predictable, and well-ordered, aboard Plexus for several years. Cheney is one of more than seven hundred members of A Crew. A Crew and B Crew cycle, each spending four years in a “cytopic” state (basically, in suspended animation), then four of being awake and acting as crew members of Plexus. This creates a discrepancy between the actual age, and the years they appear to have aged. For instance, Cheney is seventeen in biological years, but in real-time years he is thirty-three. He has a crush on an older girl, Caromy. She is biologically twenty-one, but she’s actually “forty-one in real-time years.”  Plexus is quite large, big enough that its inhabitants can do lots of the things they might do on the Earth they left behind, like play sports, hold concerts, and throw parties. In fact, Cheney gets his first inkling that something has gone wrong during the middle of a birthday party in a virtual environment in the ship’s Mimexis Chamber. He’s attending Haemon Goh’s ninth birthday party (“Haemon was turning nine, but he was really seventeen.”). The kids at the party are disappointed when the Mimexis Chamber the party is being held in is taken over by some of the adults, who need it to “run a few charts.” What Cheney learns a little later through his parents, who are Senators and scientists, is that the charts they’re running, and the calculations and planning they’re doing, is to try to perform evasive measures to get out of the way of the path of an immense wave of radiation.

They can’t effectively evade the radiation, despite their best efforts. All they can do is to alter the ship’s course enough to avoid being hit in the direct middle of the wave. The entire population of the ship that’s not in a cytopic state – A Crew – has to go under a Red Alert. Families gather together at preassigned stations, clad in protective spacesuits, and await the worst – potentially death for everyone aboard the Plexus and an end to their mission.  The radiation doesn’t seem to have much of an immediate effect, but very soon the A Crew find that, while they have not been effected outright, their ship has, and is undergoing a major change. The Plexus transforms into a living organism. Everything that is a part of the ship experiences a change, the wires becoming like veins and arteries, the automatic sliding doors change into heart-like valves that no longer want to open to let people in and out of rooms, the transport system’s vehicles leave their tracks, and even a robot dog that Yeltsin, a friend of Cheney invents, changes into a dog-like creature that no longer obeys its creator. Also, the ship’s immune system acts as if the humans within it are something like attacking bacteria.  Cheney and the rest of the A Crew seem to be in an impossible situation. The communication and transportation systems they’ve relied upon no longer can be counted on. 

Some of the best parts of Living Hell are those that describe the details about the problems Cheney and his friends encounter, and the clever solutions that they come up with. Jinks’s three-dimensional main characters and the descriptions of the dramatic changes Plexus goes through make Living Hell a SF book you’ll want to check out and add to your reading lists. Many of her novels have a lot of dark humor in them and I really like that. Some examples of these include Evil Genius, Genius Squad, and The Reformed Vampire Support Group, and if you haven’t yet read these novels you owe it to yourselves to read them, as well. Catherine Jinks is one of my favorite YA authors, and any time I hear about a new book of hers coming out, I want to rush out and get it.