2018 young adult/crossover SF, first of its series. The aliens
arrived, brain-clamped all the adults, and implanted some kind of
parasite in the children. Then things got bad.
This is the full novel of which Othermother was a short excerpt
in the August 2018 Clarkesworld. It starts off well: Bo breaks out
of the "warehouse" where he and some of the other children are housed
in a drugged state, is found by Violet, and joins the Lost Boys, a
gang of fellow adolescent escapees led by Wyatt. Bo's still looking
for his sister Lia, in one of the other warehouses, and all the while
the alien invaders are searching for him.
There's good stuff here, such as the "clamp" which puts its (adult)
subjects into a virtual heaven while their bodies carry on going
through the motions of life, with just enough autonomy to feed
themselves occasionally, is both an interesting idea in itself and a
convenient way of making sure there aren't any grown-ups around to
stop the children from having adventures. The "othermothers", crude
alien imitations of brain-clamped parents sent out to hunt the missing
children and equipped with a range of familiar phrases, are suitably
creepy. And the children are plausible: they think they're immortal
and follow their charismatic leader, even when they start dying.
But somehow it never quite managed to grab me. Bo is an immigrant from
Nigeria who finds he's developing superpowers; Violet is a trans girl
able to self-medicate from looted pharmacies now that parental
permission is a thing of the past, trying to work out what sort of
person she wants to be now that she's got past that big obstacle; and
Wyatt is a charismatic psychopath (as it turns out, literally, so
there's the "mentally ill person as villain" trope that nobody needed
to see again). But none of them ever quite came alive for me; yes, I
get it, found family good, but if found family is just as hateful as
genetic family what's the point?
Eh. May well work for people other than me.
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