The Scorpion Rules
The Prisoners of Peace series, Book 1
Erin Bow
Simon and Schuster
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: When climate collapse and incessant global wars threatened humanity's extinction four centuries ago, the desperate United Nations tasked the AI Talis - once a human mind, uploaded and upgraded - with finding a solution. None expected it to simply take over, but it did, seeing no other viable fix to humanity's seemingly-inherent self-destructive habits. After gaining control of suborbital weapons arrays and getting the attention of the world's leaders (blowing up a few cities to make its point), it laid down new rules for civilization and for future conflicts. In addition to limits on allowable lethal weapons and other factors, everyone who aspires to lead in any capacity must now leave a Child of Peace, one of their own offspring, in the AI's care, in isolated preceptures scattered around the world. Each is a hostage to their parents' good behavior; to declare war is to see their own children killed. It may not stop war - nothing could stop all war - but it does limit the scope and duration, and ensures that every leader has as much skin in the game as the foot soldiers they send into battle.
Greta, Duchess of Halifax and Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy, has been a Child of Peace at Precepture Four for most of her life. Though she has friends of a sort among her fellow hostages, and she feels some affection toward the Abbot, the aging AI in charge of the facility, it is by no means a pleasant existence, forever under the eye of robotic guardians that monitor nearly every word. Still, nobody can argue with the results of Talis's edicts, a planet slowly recovering from overexploitation and a population that no longer threatens to blast itself out of existence every other week. Then a new boy arrives, Elian, the grandson of the leader of Cumberland, an upstart new nation on her country's border. Unlike the other Children of Peace, he was not raised in the halls of power, not conditioned to understand his potential role, never believing he'd ever be important enough to be a hostage. His rebellious personality brings out the worst sides of their captors as they struggle to break him and keep him in line. Watching him rage against the system wakes something in Greta and the others, opening their eyes to the injustices of the system... an awakening that might have come too late. For with a new, hostile general on the field, war seems inevitable, meaning both her and Elian's lives will soon be forfeit.
REVIEW: The premise looked intriguing, a world in which AI was not actively destroying the world (which it currently is; even disregarding all other problematic aspects, the environmental costs alone... but I digress) but attempting to save us and our planet from ourselves, using the old practice of royal hostages in an attempt to enforce peace. And The Scorpion Rules did indeed start out interesting, an outwardly-peaceful utopia that was only achieved through invasive surveillance and social engineering to the point of being closer to a dystopia. Somewhere along the way, though, that promise petered out, washed away by a whiny and helpless main character, a dragging plot, and a tendency to wallow in pain and torment long beyond effectiveness.
From her first scenes, Greta prides herself on her ability to remain calm and self-controlled in the face of her essentially dystopian surroundings, where Swan Riders can swoop in at a moment's notice and pluck a classmate from the room for immediate termination. A student of Marcus Aurelius and stoicism, she embraces her role as a princess and a Child of Peace, believing that her compliance truly is essential to ensure her nation's safety and that being a good cog helps the whole machine of Talis's plan protect the world. (There's a running attempt at humor with a "holy text" of Utterances by the AI overlord, which are mostly geeky lines that sound too much like modern immature self-important techbros for me to really find them amusing, given the real-world damage being wrought by certain techbros.) She only has a little over a year left before she ages out of her role, and it seems reasonable that she'll survive until then, until Elian arrives - the first Child of Peace she has ever seen to be brought into the precepture in chains, and the first to openly defy their robotic masters, even when it earns him pain and eventual torture. She knows, of course, that the otherwise kindly Abbot and the other AI "teachers" use torment to punish rule infractions, but it never hit so close to home as when she watches their efforts to grind down the outspoken boy. He even goes so far as to attempt escape across the Saskatchewan prairies, despite knowing how such an effort could backfire on his nation and his loved ones. At some point, his stubbornness crosses a line from caged animal defiance into outright stupidity... just as Greta's stoic embracing of her role and refusal to see what's right in front of her eyes made me question her ostensible intelligence. Somehow, though, she's considered the leader of her classmates, even though her roommate Da-Xia, heiress to a Himalayan throne where rulers are considered divine, displays much stronger leadership skills, regal bearing, and defiance at multiple points, and isn't as willfully blind to obvious things. Tensions ratchet up as war encroaches on Greta's and Elian's nations, punctuated by a bold move by Cumberland that demonstrates how humans have a way of eventually circumventing even rules intended for self-preservation. At some point round about the halfway point or just past, though, the plot starts to lose steam as a near-divine intervention arrives, at which point things drag and start devolving to indulge in what approaches torture porn, emotional and physical, in ways that don't advance the story at all. Greta does more unintelligent things, Elian does some boneheaded stuff too, a weird plot obsession with horny ungulates unfolds, some late-game spiritualism seeps in through the cracks, and eventually the story ends in a weird grayish area that's not quite a satisfactory resting point or conclusion but isn't a cliffhanger either.
There are a few points in its favor; this isn't a book where the dystopia is magically fixed by the ending, for one thing, and even if it's hard to see real world leaders hesitating to declare a war even if it means the death of a family member (especially given how often wars are pushed by people just to the side of the official power structure, the ones who make the money off the spoils), it's an interesting idea. There's also some ambiguity involved, as Talis may be using an oversized sledgehammer but did not start off with bad intentions, and still believes that saving the world - which it did inarguably do, at least initially - is worth "small" sacrifices like a few well-born children and the odd major city. The story just became muddled in the telling, not at all helped by a main character who spent too much time whining and ignoring things and not enough doing main character things like solving problems or taking action or just plain not being a passive tool of an oppressive system.
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