#space demons

Andrew is our main kid, and he’s the Popular Boy. He’s good-looking, his family is rich, and good things just seem to come to him. Over the course of the book, his parents split up, and that’s really what his story is about. There’s an overall theme of hatred going on here (more on that later), and Andrew’s frustration at a situation he isn’t even aware is happening at first seems real for a kid in his position. He’s not perfect, he’s just popular, and his thoughtless actions and tacit bossing around of other characters isn’t glorified or glamourised, just shown as-is, which I appreciated.

Ben is the best friend archetype, a weaker-willed kid who lets himself get pushed around a lot by the others. I actually liked him a lot better than Andrew as he proved a nice contrast - where Andrew is self-centred, Ben is nicer but a complete pushover. When he disappears into the game overnight, it feels bad because it’s Ben, he didn’t really deserve it like Andrew would. His more pacifistic nature also balances Andrew’s growing anger and frustration.

Elly is our new girl, who’s a Weird Kid. She and her dad move around a lot, so she’s used to being the new girl at school, and not really fitting in. She has issues about her mum abandoning her and about being constantly on the move - she wants to put down roots and stay in one place, which doesn’t suit her dad at all. I remember liking her a lot more when I was a kid, possibly because she was the token girl; she’s not a bad character or anything, but she again came off as a bit standoffish to the others.

Mario is the Delinquent, a borderline bully who ends up playing Space Demons with Andrew because the two are competitive and don’t like each other. It makes for a nice dynamic between the two of them, especially since Mario is legitimately kind of shitty as a person. Still doesn’t make it right when Andrew deliberately doesn’t save him in the game, getting him killed and making him disappear in real life. I also like how he isn’t quite a one-dimensional bully type - a particularly affecting scene is how, after Andrew realises you have to hate someone and point the gun at them to get them into the game, Andrew the rich kid can’t do it to himself, but disadvantaged bully Mario can.

Space Demons is a reasonably accurate portrayal of a video game, which is often rare in this specific genre, and particularly rare in the 80s! Yeah, this book was published in 1986, when home computing was a lot younger and games themselves different to the kinds we have now. Rubinstein doesn’t fall into the trap some books in this genre do of giving her fictional game way better graphics than were available - it’s not well-described exactly what it looks like, which I think is why it works and seems accurate enough, but it was very easy from the descriptions to imagine a pixelly mid-80s game, like Metroid or the first Zelda.

And yeah, like I said above, this book is thematically about hate. Each kid finds things to hate in themselves or their lives, fuelled by the game. To get into the game, you have to hate. To play well, you have to hate. The thing the game first sends into the real world is a gun, and in order to beat the game, the kids must give up the gun, even if they don’t want to. An unsubtle metaphor? Yes, but the book’s for the middle-grade audience, you gotta be a little less subtle, and it was well-integrated into the story.