What I’ve been reading – The Maze Runner trilogy

(Content note – This post contains spoilers for the books. Also mention of post-apocalyptic scenarios, though I don’t go into that bit very much. Also, at the end, a bit about fantasy high-tech medical stuff described in more graphic terms than you might want to hear.)

Caveat: I read the first book and the first part of the second book, but then skim-flipped from there through to the end of the third, as by then they’d moved into the ‘post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by crazed, doomed survivors’ part of the setting, which is something that just doesn’t float my boat. It is therefore possible that I might have missed an explanation that made at least somewhat more sense out of the plot. If so, do let me know, and my apologies.

Anyway, this is going to be a summary of my thoughts on the trilogy as a whole. If you want a really good chapter-by-chapter deconstruction of the first book, do check out Whitley Birks’ excellent review (plus her other reviews while you’re there; it’s a superb blog with all kinds of interesting points about what well-known authors got horribly wrong through lazy research/not doing the writing).

Here’s the overriding impression with which this trilogy left me: the author had a lot of good ideas but then had no idea how to write a coherent plot that would properly account for them all.

I mean, you can picture James Dashner thinking “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to write about a large group of children trapped in a meadow in the middle of a maze, with no idea what was going on! Or for them to have some sort of trial that involved making their way a hundred miles across a post-apocalyptic wasteland within a time limit! Or to have a dilemma about whether it’s OK to do terrible things to children if it’s the only chance of saving the world! Or a government agency with the acronym WICKED and the slogan ‘WICKED is good’ and amnesiac people remembering this slogan but having no idea what it means! Doesn’t that sound great?”

And, yes… it was. For a while. Right up until the point where we got what was supposed to be the Big Reveal explanation for each of those. At which point I would be looking at it and thinking “What?! That doesn’t make any sense! What about…??”

Main plot points that evoked the “What?! That doesn’t make any sense!” explanation from me:

The reason WICKED are experimenting on the children is to find a cure for a deadly plague (known as the Flare) which is ravaging the rest of the human race; most of the children are naturally immune (some of them are apparently there as control subjects) so WICKED desperately need to study the children and find out what accounts for their immunity, in hopes of finding a cure for everyone else. So far, so good. The trouble is, they’re doing it by studying the way their brains function (by putting them through various stressful situations and monitoring their responses). Which makes no sense whatsoever. If you want to know what makes someone immune to an illness, surely you start by studying their immune system? Tissue biopsies of the brain would probably also be useful, but the only time we see WICKED trying to do that, it’s when they want to dissect Thomas’s entire brain (and only Thomas’s – they don’t seem to feel any requirement to compare biopsies from a variety of the children).

They’re also, apparently, taking a bizarrely long time to do this. The children get taken away from their parents at an early age and kept by WICKED for years until they’re old enough to take part in the Maze trials, which then go on for two more years. Since the time from infection by the Flare virus to destruction of your functioning brain doesn’t, from what I could see, seem to be that long – how exactly is it that the virus hasn’t wiped out everyone non-immune during those years and left the whole question of a cure moot?

WICKED are also quite extraordinarily profligate with money. The Maze walls, we are told, are hundreds of feet high and move into different positions every night. (Wait, what?! How do you even make a wall that high stable enough to be moved?? Now I’m all ‘Ye canna change the laws of physics, laws of physics, Cap’n!’ and that wasn’t even the plot hole I was about to discuss.) We also learn that the Maze is eight times the size of the central area (the Glade) which is in itself the size of eight football fields, so that is one bloody big maze. All made out of moveable walls hundreds of feet high. And the children live there for two years, with the walls being moved every night and supplies being sent in weekly. In fact, we learn in the second book that there are two such groups of children, not just one. So… how much did all this cost?? The cost of first building and then maintaining two such mazes would be… so colossally expensive that we need a new term for ‘colossally expensive’. I mean, which planet do you sell to whom in order to finance something like that? And this is all meant to be taking place in a post-apocalyptic world when even basic services are likely to be going belly-up. (We are told at one point in the third book that WICKED have managed to corner available funding and resources due to being the only ones holding out the promise of a cure, but… funding and resources available for cornering at that point are still not going to be that great.)

So, are we seriously meant to believe that at absolutely no point in the design of the Mazes did anyone in charge point out “Hey, I realise walls hundreds of feet high sound exciting, but surely we can get the same effect at a fraction of the price by making the walls something like eight or ten feet high”? Or that at no point during the two years that all this was going on and that both groups of children were making zero progress on cracking the code or figuring out how to escape did anyone say”‘Guys, this experiment isn’t getting us anywhere and you can’t justify claiming these levels of funds any longer. Find something to hurry it up”? I’m sorry, I just do not buy the idea that any government agency anywhere in the history of government agencies who were, are, or will be can get away with being that blithely unconcerned about funding availability for that long.

Nearly done (not because that’s an exhaustive list, just because it’s a list of the things that bugged me the most) but I do have to mention the Retractor that we learned about in ‘The Death Cure’. This is, supposedly, a hi-tech device that removes implants from the children’s brains by sending wires in via their ear canals. Because apparently Dashner either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that ears aren’t just holes stretching straight through to the brain. You send a wire in through someone’s ear, the first thing it’s going to meet is the eardrum, which seals the outer canal off completely from the middle ear. Go through that, and you’re getting into some complex and delicate anatomy – the tiny bones of the middle ear, and the inner-ear organs that process sounds and monitor your balance. I’m a GP, not an ENT surgeon, but trying to pull an implant out via that lot strikes me as a really bad idea.

Also, since they are apparently going for this appallingly bad via-the-ear plan, why do the Retractors go on the children’s faces to perform this procedure? Wouldn’t it make far more sense for them to go on one side of the head? I mean, if it’s on the face, the wire it sends out has to curve sideways and downwards to find the ear and then upwards and forwards again to negotiate the ear canal… I think Dashner was, once again, going for the ‘this is such a cool scary image’ approach over actual practicalities.

OK, I’m done. What did everyone else think of the books? Did I miss anything important? Do let me know.

Happy blogging anniversary!

Yes, indeed – ’tis one year exactly since the day when I received the great news that I had been granted the high honour of a FreeThoughtBlogs blog. Since then, I’ve been privileged to get to know some great people and, of course, to actually post on here on those admittedly infrequent occasions when I get time to do so.

I know I haven’t posted nearly as often as I’d like to, but I’m still thrilled to be here; getting this blog really was one of the best things that happened to me in 2016, and that would be the case even if it hadn’t been a basically sucky year overall. So, happy blogging anniversary to me and to the many other bloggers who started at the same time as I did.

(Aaaaaaand… I am marking the day appropriately by, once again, being almost late for dinner, which is more of a problem this time since I’m the one making it. So, apologies for the brevity of this, but I must go.)

I Aten’t Dead

You may have noticed that I’ve been around very little over the past several months. Actually, it’s more likely that you haven’t noticed – there are, after all, plenty of excellent blogs on this site and a regular stream of posts from all directions – but it’s still something I feel guilty about.

The reason for my near-absence is that, on top of all the other stuff involved in being a mother and part-time GP, as of this school year I’ve also had to start part-time homeschooling my son. (The other part of the time he’s with tutors.) This certainly has its benefits and has been an interesting experience, but it’s also a huge suck of time and energy that I didn’t really have to spare. So, at any time when I could potentially be sitting down to blog, invariably either I have stuff that genuinely is more important to do right then (getting son’s lessons ready for the next day, getting work letters done), or I’m just plain too exhausted to face getting my brain to string sentences together, or both. On top of that, there’s the whole thing where my brain keeps going “But.. terrible political situation in the US… I should be helping out by making incisive posts! But I have no incisive posts to make! So how can I post about anything less important when so much important stuff is going on!”. Which doesn’t help.

Anyway… all of that is still going on, so this isn’t exactly the ‘and now my problems are solved and I can return to normal blogging’ post. It’s just the ‘sod it, I’m fed up of working my way through endless to-do lists and want to do something for me for a change’ post. Yeah, maybe the stuff I blog about isn’t going to be terribly interesting or important. But I still have things I want to write about, and I think that taking a break from everything else to write about them is something I need to do right now.

By the way, if anyone wants to throw out a word of encouraging interest in any of my currently planned topics, that would be great. They are, in no particular order of priority:

  • Homeschooling
  • Whatever I happen to have been reading lately
  • A description of the first episode of 11.22.63. (That one may have to wait… writing a detailed description of something like that is a big time-consuming project that probably isn’t ideal to take on when I’m just trying to get back to blogging anything, but it’s still something I’d like to do eventually.)
  • Actually finishing the detailed breakdown I promised nine months ago of the many errors in Lenny Esposito’s ‘but we should stop transgender people transitioning because science!’ of which I have so far managed only two posts out of a planned four.
  • Counter-apologetics, including short series of posts on a) why I became an unbeliever and b) why, specifically, I concluded Christianity’s claims not to be true.

Obviously, you may not care as long as I write something/not care anyway, which is fine. But any of those did make you gasp in glee and say “Wow, that’s exactly what it’s always been my dream to read about!” or even just think “Hmm, that sounds kind of interesting”, then, y’know, leave a comment and tell me so.