Allegiant by Veronica Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Seems odd, but I found this the best in the series. Things start to click into place. The (terrible, no good not even) scientific explanations made sense of things that had bothered me about the story.
At first, the switching back and forth between Tris and Four seemed odd, but I eventually started to suspect why.
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The scientific explanations made NO sense. Read more about how genetics works, about small populations, about founder effect, about random sampling – basically, all the things the author clearly did not bother to research before slapping this book together – to get a better picture of exactly why this explanation makes no sense, either in itself or in the context of the story as a whole.
Yeah, the science was obviously not real. Probably why they put it under the fiction label.
No, that’s not how science fiction works. If you’re going to make up imaginary things that simply don’t exist, then that’s fantasy. (And in hindsight, the author probably should have just done that and blamed everything on a magic curse – it would have made more sense than what she actually wrote.) No, science fiction is based on actual concepts, simply used in a fictional way, taken to hypothetical extremes, exaggerated for effect. In this case, the story is using the actual concepts of genetics, genetic manipulation and heredity as the foundation for the fictional concepts of the personality trait genes (cowardice, selfishness, etc.). You have to get the actual concepts correct in order to base your fictionalized idea on them, otherwise your fiction doesn’t hold up because its foundations don’t make sense. The author herself understands this. She says she researched genetics. But as someone who actually understands genetics, I can say that she either lied or she didn’t read enough about it, because 90 percent of her concepts are completely incorrect and ignore truths about how the science works that cancel out her theories, and so the fictionalized concepts she’s placed on top of them don’t hold up. The science is wrong and the logic, both within the explanations themselves and when retroactively applied to the worldbuilding of the first two books, makes no sense whatsoever. I have heard that she realizes this now, that she regrets not researching more into the science before writing this book. Supposedly all she did was peruse the internet, instead of looking up actual books or speaking to experts in the field, like any diligent author knows to do when writing about an unfamiliar subject. Reportedly the movie for Allegiant will be drifting away from this concept and coming up with a different reasoning for the experiment as they all realize that her explanation made no sense.
I actually stopped reading science fiction in the 90s because everything I read fell into this category you describe of not how science fiction works. When I decided that it was okay to me to realize the “fiction” part of science fiction meant it was to explain the author’s ideas and not science’s ideas in general, I was able to start reading it again.
Also, this review is JUST my opinion. It is okay for us to disagree. This response is the worst possible way to convince anyone to change it.
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