#remnants

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I haven't finished the series, but! A few thoughts on Remnants:

I love how prescient the depictions of Earth in the 2020s end up being. Jobs's parents' music is "whiny emo stuff" from the turn of the millennium, cars have gotten self-driving but still suck, and trust in the U.S. government is at rock bottom.

TBH, the big thing Remnants is missing for me is the within-team love and support of Animorphs. I said the same thing about Everworld and Gone (also series I gave up on ~3 books in), but if you're going to surround your protagonists with horror, you have GOT to have something warm or comforting to balance that out. The Mayflower crew distrusting each other AND being under constant attack by the alien ship just makes the series feel too relentless with not enough humor or love to balance it out. At some point the 40th terrible thing happening to Jobs or Mo'Steel in a single day isn't so much horrifying as it is exhausting to read.

Relatedly, the other issue with Remnants is that it'd be a pretty good horror novel, but it's marketed as (and in many ways kind of tries to be) a sci fi adventure story. I can take a guess as to why — if I was Scholastic I'd also be pumping this as the spiritual sequel to Animorphs — but it's Procrustean as hell.

That series is begging to be YA, even though it predates YA genre conventions. It would work so much better as a trilogy of big meaty stories (see: Endling, which is spectacular) than as fourteen choppy little novels. As it is, each novel feels like it doesn't so much tell an episode in the survivors' lives as, like, half an episode, followed by a cliffhanger for the next book.

Speaking of Endling: holy hell does Remnants need to be illustrated. I don't often say that, but. "Mother Ship tried to recreate Earth, but all she had to work from was Hieronymus Bosch paintings" is such a cool concept for me as an adult... and it completely flew over my head as a kid. And I was that weird freaky horror-obsessed kid who literally had printouts of Bosch paintings hanging on my bedroom walls — I'm about as close to the target audience as you can get! But there's just too much going on in that story for the concept to come across. I wish it'd been illustrated, or even better been published as a comic book.

Crazy that it's been a whole year since this show launched. It's had over 120k downloads, some beautiful fan works, incredibly engaged fans unpicking its mysteries and some gorgeous coverage from podcast reviewers and journalists.