Hey y’all! Welcome to Fast Facts with Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me while I explore the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever (and never) wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode is a little different. I want to do a mini-series of amateur book reviews. Now, I won’t do these every week, but once in a while, you’ll get to hear about the books I like (or don’t like). Today, I’m reviewing An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green. This will contain spoilers.
First off, let’s talk about Hank Green, aka America’s most popular science teacher. That’s the guy on SciShow, teaching us all about biology and chemistry and psychology and whatever else is going on in science these days. He’s a chemist by education, but he’s a content creator by trade. He got his start on Youtube making videos back and forth with his brother, John Green. You know, John Green, the Crash Course History guy. Also John Green, the YA novel author. The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska. That guy. Same guy! He and Hank are brothers! Small world. Hank has too many jobs, also. Earlier this week, he said that exact thing in a tweet. To give you an idea of how many things Hank does, a fan made an entire website dedicated to his jobs. It’s called “Days Since Hank Green Last Started a New Thing .com” Right now, it’s been 22 days. He started a new podcast. The spreadsheet of all the recorded things he’s started has 86 rows, and that’s not even including all the things he collaborates on. So basically, busy guy.
Somewhere in his 86 jobs, which includes being a father, Hank Green found time to write a book. Two books actually, but today we’re just talking about his first novel, titled An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.
This book is complicated. It’s complicated in part because it’s long and there’s a lot going on, but it’s also complicated because it seems to be part book, part social commentary. It blends these two facets nearly flawlessly, but it does take your brain for a spin nonetheless. So let’s just jump straight into it, shall we?
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a science fiction novel. Should I have led with that? I also don’t like science fiction, maybe I should’ve led with that too. However, I absolutely adore this book, and let me tell you why. The science fiction I’ve read in school is so white-male focused, which is hard. It’s all like ooh what if technology was bad and everything was as bad for white people as it is for everyone else, or what if the government was controlling or robots were evil. Like, we’ve been there, you know? The government is controlling. Robots are evil. An episode is coming on why my devices aren’t allowed to give me personalized ads, why I don’t have TikTok, and why I kind of hate that my family has an Amazon Echo Dot. But that’s not this episode. This episode is on how Hank Green, a middle aged white man, wrote a contemporary science fiction novel about a bisexual millennial girl and managed to fit in highly nuanced social commentary while he was doing it.
The book is narrated by its main character, April May, and it opens with a very honest introduction to her and the kind of story this is going to be. April introduces herself as “one of the most important things that has ever happened to the human race,” and says she’ll tell the story as honestly as she can, but she has a “significant pro-me” bias. So, right off the bat, we’re talking about fame, critical thinking skills, biases in storytelling, knowing your author, lots of good stuff. And that’s literally just page 1!
So, April recently graduated art school and is working in New York City for a graphic design company. She’s walking home one night when she stumbles across a statue that she’s never seen before. But not just any statue… ooh, intrigue. The statue is about 10 feet tall, seemingly metal, and looks like a giant Samurai warrior. When she touches it, it feels warm, but in the way styrofoam feels warm. So, you know, not metal. She decides to interview it, like a news reporter, and calls her friend Andy to come film the video. He does, and in the interview, she names the statue Carl. Overnight, her video goes viral, because apparently these Carl statues have miraculously appeared in at least sixty cities worldwide, and no one knows where they came from. April and Andy are now essentially internet famous.
It’s important to note that April is bi and living with her girlfriend Maya, but April has commitment issues so they don’t sleep in the same room because that would be like moving in together and April is Not Ready For That. Maya plays a much bigger role in the second book, because as April spirals deeper and deeper into internet fame and political punditry, Maya gets put on the backburner and they break up. But there’s more to Maya than meets the eye. More on that later too.
I mentioned political punditry! Pretty soon, it’s clear that the Carls are not of terrestrial origin. Simply put, they’re aliens. We think. Nobody knows! April solves a puzzle and makes some questionable choices by giving the Carls some iodine and americium, two elements. Giving him these makes his right hand fall off. It also infects April with a contagious dream that she then spreads to everyone around her. Wild! The Dream has some puzzles in it that are meant for the entire human population to work together to solve, which is why it had to be infectious. After this happens, the shit metaphorically hits the fan.
Suddenly we know the Carls are sentient and probably aliens, and we also know that they essentially picked April. Now, I’m sure we’re all very familiar with the way conspiracy theories travel and grow. The newest conspiracy theory is that the Carls are dangerous and that April might not even be human, and even if she is, she’s working on their side and that makes her dangerous too. These conspiracy theorists call themselves the Defenders, and their leader is a man named Peter Petrawiki. Suddenly, April finds herself to be a political voice with some influence in the world, giving interviews on the news and seeing her words have real life impact. She wants to spread a message of love and acceptance, and she really does believe that the Carls are good, but she can’t explain what’s happening any better than anyone else.
Tensions continue to escalate. April kinda loves fame. She has also found herself rapidly becoming very rich off of her interviews and appearances. Her relationships take the fall. Unfortunately, if humanity is to survive, April needs her relationships. Remember how the Dream is a series of puzzles that people have to work together to solve? Well, the last puzzle only appears for April, but she needs a huge amount of help to solve it, because what does she know about airplanes and accordions and Mayan numerals? It’s a complicated puzzle. Well, now it’s Maya’s time to shine.
Maya, aside from being also an art student and also gay, is a genius. When the Dream first started to spread, Maya took to the internet, forming discussion forums and chat groups to work out problems together under a screenname that kept her anonymous. She solvex several puzzles completely on her own and collaborated on many more. April had to repair her damaged relationship with Maya to get her help, but together with a programming team, they created an app where every person working on the Dream could organize, discuss, and solve every puzzle systematically. In this app they built, April was able to get the information she needed to solve the last puzzle. The only thing is, the Defenders got there first.
Let’s remember who the Defenders are. They’re the conspiracy theorists and they hate April. One of them tried to assassinate her. Carl killed him. That made them hate her more. So when the Defenders solve this puzzle, what did they do? They changed the answer. They changed it so that April would find an answer that would lead her to an abandoned warehouse in upstate New York, pretending that Carl told her to go there. She goes, but she livestreams the whole thing on Facebook, so when the Defenders trap April inside and set the warehouse on fire, the whole world sees it. And I mean the whole world, she’s that famous. Right before the warehouse collapses, she solves the final puzzle, and is able to tell her livestream that someone needs to press a piece of gold against every single Carl in the world at the same time, and once she says that, the warehouse collapses on her, and April dies.
The rest of the book is narrated by Andy. When a piece of gold was touching every Carl, the New York Carl flew straight up into the air and disappeared. Every other Carl disappeared where it stood. April’s team is sad but still working together to try and put their lives back together. Andy, being as rich and famous as April was, is trying to help put the world back together. Then, Andy gets a text. It says, “Knock knock.” It’s from April.
And then Hank ends the book!! Infuriating. I was so mad when I read it the first time, because I read it when it came out and I had to wait until he finished writing the second book to learn what happened next. So that’s the plot, which is amazing and I love it and that’s a good chunk of the book review done, but if you want to hear about what I think of his social commentary, please, listen on.
Hank Green is at an interesting level of internet fame. I know who he is, obviously. Some of you might know who he is, others may not. He gets recognized at the grocery store. Sometimes his tweets go viral. He is very, very familiar with how the internet, and especially social media, works. After all, he’s built his livelihood off of it, and is now in a place where he can critique it without risking his platform. He’s also had a platform on the internet for 13 years, so he knows what he’s talking about.
When April gets a platform, she really really wants to do good with it. Wouldn’t anybody? Right? Your voice is suddenly heard by a lot of people, and you want to say the right things. Except before long, you find out that the internet doesn’t reward nice things. Every social media and news platform, except TikTok, oddly, actively rewards outrage content. That means that when people are mad or make content that makes people mad, that content does really, really well. Nobody’s “I love my dog” tweet goes viral, but if you have a platform and you say something controversial, well, a lot more people are going to engage with that.
That’s why the Defenders rose in power so quickly. They were scared and angry, and they made other people scared and angry, so suddenly they had a huge platform. This is why it’s hard to make ethical social media. Is spreading misinformation ethical? No. Is fearmongering ethical? No. But who gets to decide what’s fearmongering and what’s raising legitimate concern? Where does the freedom of speech draw a line? Right now, it’s basically nowhere, so any viewpoint can skyrocket to popularity as long as people are engaging with it. Social media and news platforms allow this to happen because more engagement makes them more money. It keeps you using the service and looking at it for longer, so they don’t care what it is that you’re looking at.
When you’re internet famous, it comes with hate. April spent a lot of time responding to hate. It’s hard to ignore! Plus, it makes you more famous, and despite starting out with good intentions, we were explicitly told that April May is a raging narcissist. She’ll chase this fame no matter the cost. Eventually, the combination of unwavering faith in Carl and the constant desire for more fame, more platform, more engagement, cost her her life. Obviously, internet fame doesn’t spell death for the vast majority of people, but Hank Green’s commentary on the emotional and societal risks of fame obsession is glaring.
I also greatly respect how bold Hank’s commentary was. He basically said “yeah, Twitter sucks, Facebook sucks, the internet rewards misinformation, fame and money will ruin your life.” No fear! Bold! Nuanced, too, because the world really was in danger and April really was right and really did need to spread her message in order to save the world. Social media is a terrible place for nuance. You want to have a conversation where you objectively look at all sides and acknowledge parts of an opponent’s argument while maintaining confidence in your side and also acknowledging that you don’t know everything and your opinion has room to grow? No. You can’t do that on social media. You really just can’t. But you can do that in a book, which is why I’m glad that Hank finally did.
8/10 book, Hank. Exceptional commentary. Put more people of color in it next time. Actually, he did put more people of color in the second book, plus a lot more brilliant women and even more cool commentary, so that’s very good.
Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m working on making transcriptions of these episodes available. I’ll let you know when and where you can find them. For now, you can follow me on Twitter @FastFactsPod, and follow this podcast to be notified every time I release a new episode. This is Callie, signing off.
Comentarios