Books I didn't finish: Q

You may not have noticed this, but I like reading bad books. When a novel lets me down, my immediate reaction isn’t to cast its author out of my Kindle wishlist for all time; it’s to take a keen interest in whatever they write next.

In that vein, today we’re looking at Q, Christina Dalcher’s followup to 2017’s Vox, which I didn’t really like at all.

Q is another near-future dystopian story, this time set in an America where a eugenicist organization has reorganized society around people’s quotient, or “Q” scores. The education system is divided into three tiers, with the silver schools reserved for students with top-level Q scores, green schools serving the “average” kids and the dreaded yellow State Schools hoovering up anyone whose Q falls below a certain threshold. The yellow schools have recently moved far out into the countryside, and the forces behind the Q system have conspired to make the monthly visits that families are meant to be able to avail of all but impossible--in practical terms, once a child gets taken away on a yellow bus, they don’t come back.

Elena Fairchild is a teacher at a silver school who is just barely able to contain her seething anger at the entire system and the society it’s built. Her fury boils over when her nine year old daughter Freddie gets sent to a yellow school, amidst a wave of high-performing students suddenly plummeting down the Q scale for no apparent reason. Determined to get to the bottom of what’s really going on, Elena intentionally flunks her teacher evaluations to follow Freddie, and thus uncovers the sinister secret behind the entire Q system. 

(I didn’t get to the part where you actually find out what the secret is, but I can probably guess based on the fact that the organization behind all of this is called “The Genics Institute”)

On paper, this is exactly the sort of book I should love. I like my dystopias and my sci-fi near-future and focused mainly on social issues rather than technology. The American education system and the modern experience of student pressure and anxiety are rich veins for dystopian writers to mine, and it’s nice to see someone tackle The Kids Today in a dystopian vein and not obsess over smartphones or social media. The book also takes a look at the looming automation crisis, which is something that way too many people simply aren’t paying attention to, even though it poses a grave threat to our current economic system that there doesn’t seem to be any effort whatsoever from our leaders to avoid.

But a good premise doesn’t make for a good book. As I’ll explain in a minute, Q’s premise isn’t as strong as it appears at first glance, but that ultimately doesn’t matter because the story built on top of it isn’t great either.

The danger of writing in a near future or current-day setting, especially when you’re only deviating from established reality slightly (the Q score is partially based on actual intelligence-measuring methods that predated IQ scores), is that suspension of disbelief becomes a greater issue than if you were writing in a further-future setting or a world radically transformed from our current society. Q’s setting invites nit-picking, and there are a lot of nits here to pick.

To start with, the Q system makes no sense. We’re told that it’s such an objective measure of a person’s intelligence and aptitude that it can be determined prenatally, but also that being late for school or work can cause one’s score to fall. What, then, is it supposed to be measuring? Is a person’s Q innate or not? This contradiction isn’t a problem diegetically because the whole Q system is a fig leaf cooked up by the villains to justify their actual agenda, but it is an issue that more people don’t notice the obvious contradiction.

The origins of the Q system (which the book spells out with chunks of thudding exposition, because like most American political writing this book has zero subtlety) lie in the searing hot-button topic of...the public education system, something that Americans are famously passionate about. We’re told that all classes of society--the conservative rural poors, the “champagne communists” (whatever those are) of the big-city penthouses, and the normal people who live in suburbs--rose up with one voice to demand that the government enact the Fitter Family Campaign’s sweeping reforms, such was the public furore over public school performance. When the villains want to push a new aspect of their agenda, like making the state schools boarding institutions or moving them far out into the boonies so the kids will never see their families again, all they need to do is invoke the dread spectre of classroom overcrowding and all dissent immediately vanishes.

My sarcastic tone should indicate how implausible I find all of this, but to be honest the book lost me at the idea that getting sent to a yellow school is basically a permanent separation. The book is trying to portray a situation where the Q system slowly took over society piece by piece, with people accepting each successive step until the major outrages didn’t seem to be too far away from what they had already decided was normal (someone even wheels out that metaphor about the frog getting boiled); this is how real repressive societies often operate, but in this case I think taking people’s children away is far too great an overreach to not be met with at least some resistance.

The fact that the book is so heavy-handed with the exposition makes all of this worse. Immersing the reader in the setting and leaving the point A to point B of how the country got to this stage hazy would have made these elements of the story easier to swallow; as it is, the book ends up revealing how few steps there were between education reform and the government stealing children, and how relatively recently all of this happened (the state schools only took on their current form a month before the start of the story), which makes it impossible to believe that there isn’t more resistance to the idea.

Before I move off of the book’s premise, we have to discuss the anti-abortion angle.

I obviously didn’t finish it, so I don’t know if this comes up again later, but there’s a scene early on that wigged me out. Elena, during a flashback to her pregnancy with Freddie, goes to one of the prenatal Q-testing centers (which, again, are run by an organization called The Genics Institute). The staff and the literature at the center heavily push abortion, in an echo of US right-wing smear campaigns against Planned Parenthood that gave me the skeevs something fierce, the idea being that mothers will get their fetuses Q score tested (via magic, I guess) and then terminate low-Q pregnancies.

Handled more deftly, this could have been a timely exploration of an actual frontier in bioethics. The combination of expanded abortion access and prenatal genetic testing has raised uncomfortable issues around the possibility of people screening for genetic conditions or disabilities in order to terminate pregancies that might result in children with, say, down syndrome. Many people have pointed out that this is uncomfortably close to eugenics, but at the same time you can’t really legalize abortion but then dictate that it can only be used in specific circumstances. And banning prenatal testing also doesn’t seem like a satisfying solution, given that such testing could give parents valuable time to prepare for potential problems instead of being blindsided by them. This is one of those tricky ethical problems created by new technology that we’re going to face more and more going into the future.

Q’s handling of the topic is...well, here’s some dialogue from the scene in question:

“If they tell me its Q is one-hundredth of a point lower than nine-point-five, I’m getting rid of it,” said a pale woman behind her mask of painstakingly applied cosmetics. “Just like I did the last time.” 

“Thank God it’s so quick now,” said the twenty-something next to her. “Wouldn’t it be great if manicures were that fast?” They both laughed.

I don’t know what Christina Dalcher’s politics are like, but the portrayal of women who have abortions as flighty air-heads who go in for the procedure on a whim, coupled with Elena bravely standing up to her mean husband and the cruel society she lives in by deciding to keep her baby, coupled with Q sharing Vox’s general hostility towards most women who aren’t the protagonist or her family members, all put me in mind of one of those Christian “faith-based” movies that don’t get released outside the US. 

Disdain for women who aren’t the main character isn’t the only thing Q shares with Vox. In fact, the book has so many similarities to Dalcher’s debut that I’m almost convinced they’re both forks of the same initial draft. I’ll excuse the near-future dystopian settings because that’s a genre trope, but in both books the protagonist is a scientifically-oriented woman whose work makes her complicit in some way with the dystopian system she lives in, and in both books the protagonist’s husband plays a key political function in running the system. In both books the protagonist is the mother of multiple children, but she’s closest to her youngest daughter and the way the dystopian system impacts that daughter in school radicalizes the protagonist against it. In both books, the protagonist has fallen out of love with her husband and they’re only staying together for the kids’ sake.

Yes, the specifics are tweaked: Elena is a science teacher and not an actual scientist, her husband plays a much more key role in the Q system and is actively in favour of it instead of reluctantly going along with it like in Vox, and the setting of Q is a lot more grounded in that there’s no sci-fi “serum” that can cure or cause aphasia. But they’re still remarkably similar to each other, down to the two main characters having basically identical personalities and narrative voices: I found the main character of Vox extremely unpleasant, and this issue is if anything more pronounced in Q.

Elena spends more or less the entire part of the book I read complaining. Sometimes those complaints are justified--the Q system is obviously abhorrent, and her husband is a huge piece of shit--but sometimes they’re less so, such as when Elena goes to Starbucks and grumps about the entire automated barista experience from start to finish, or when she makes judgemental comments about her neighbour who just had her daughter taken away, or the previously-quoted abortion clinic scene. This is all coupled with a writing style that goes way too heavy on the snappy one-liners and “clever” quips, which in addition to being grating can sometimes make it hard to figure out what the narration is even trying to say.

But even if you overlook all the problems I’ve spent this post discussing, Q is just poorly written. The story is dull and badly-paced (there’s an interminable visit to Elena’s parents right when the plot should be ramping up into high gear), the characters don’t act like real people (no one reacts to Freddie failing her Q test with nearly the level of emotion you’d expect, arguments with Elena’s husband about the morality of the Q system run on weird pretzel logic to make sure one says anything that would highlight how nonsensical the whole thing is) and it has a lot of the hallmarks of an unedited first draft. For example, during Elena’s Starbucks adventure a young woman randomly starts telling Elena her backstory in order to deliver more worldbuilding exposition to the reader.

That last point really highlights one of Q’s biggest flaws: its lack of subtlety. I knew pretty early on that I wasn’t going to finish this book, but when Elena’s 100 year old German grandmother delivers a big monologue about how the Q system and the people running it remind her of the Nazis--BECUASE IT’S EUGENICS, DO YOU SEE, THE BAD GUYS ARE DOING EUGENICS--I was ready to check out. I didn’t make it much further than that, but I don’t think I’m missing a whole lot.

Also, check out that jank-ass cover. It looks like it was made in the Windows 95 version of MS Paint.