Preliminary Scan:

Humanity is all but extinguished after a war with partials–engineered organic beings identical to humans–has decimated the world’s population. Reduced to only tens of thousands by a weaponized virus to which only a fraction of humanity is immune, the survivors in North America have huddled together on Long Island. The threat of the partials is still imminent, but, worse, no baby has been born immune to the disease in over a decade. Humanity’s time is running out.

When sixteen-year-old Kira learns of her best friend’s pregnancy, she’s determined to find a solution. Then one rash decision forces Kira to flee her community with the unlikeliest of allies. As she tries desperately to save what is left of her race, she discovers that the survival of both humans and partials rests in her attempts to answer questions of the war’s origin that she never knew to ask.

-cover and description courtesy of goodreads

Atmospheric Analysis: Summer-action-flick central. That’s okay, though, because it’s a pretty accurate way to sell this book.

Planetary Class: Post-apocalyptic soft sci-fi.

Mohs Rating: Partials comes in as a three on the Mohs scale, ranking as Physics Plus. Wells invents some perhaps-shaky biological science, but it’s an earnest try at creating new natural laws even if the execution doesn’t quite work.

Viability Rating: On the surface, the world of Partials appears to be sound. However, it never quite felt real. Human society has been destroyed–the population far more than decimated, and I never quite understood how it functioned in this crippled state. More, major plot developments hinged on perhaps-unbelievable gaps in knowledge among certain characters. I suspect this is a world best experienced at a glance, and is not meant to be one that withstands nit-picking.

Xenolinguistical Assessment: Partials is told in a somewhat dry third-person. For the most part, considering the desolate setting, this works. However, the dialogue proved to be a major stumbling block for me. Conversations were awkward and tedious, taking the form of long, unnatural infodumps. Characters would recount memories of their world’s destruction over and over again, often at inappropriate moments. My base reaction was, “People don’t talk like that!” On further reflection, I suspect more natural dialogue would have helped the pacing in Partials’ first half.

Expanded Report: I’ll get this out of the way: Partials by Dan Wells is built on some solid ground. It’s the story of Kira, a strong, somewhat militaristic heroine who is training to be a medic in a society that’s dying. All but 1% of Earth’s population has been killed off, and babies don’t survive their first fragile hours. In the hopes of discovering a cure, humanity’s leaders have demanded that women become baby factories, giving birth to their first doomed children at the age of 18. But to no avail. Humanity’s last safe haven (on Long Island, of all places) faces a double threat–attacks from a group of rebel humans known as the Voice and from the humanoid robots known as Partials who they suspect planted the virus that destroyed humanity in the first place.

Sounds awesome, right? And in some ways, it is. This is sweeping, cinematic sci-fi–the kind of dark, militaristic stuff that draws a cross-gender audience and fans who want their crapsack worlds to be SERIOUS BUSINESS. Kira’s story, peppered with child soldiers and action sequences and impressive-sounding (if perhaps not very realistic) science, would translate well to the big screen. I suspect this will draw some coveted audiences: adult sci-fi fans and, most important of all, boys.

It’s only if you poke your nose in too deeply that the problems become evident. Sure, there are some surface flaws–implausible, infodumpy dialogue and slow pacing through the novel’s first half are the most pressing. But the issues that concerned me here were those underlying the central conceits. The setting never felt quite fully fledged. I didn’t understand how the society worked. If girls are so valued for their reproductive capacity, why waste educational resources training them to be medics or nurses? Why allow them to venture out into dangerous areas? How is it possible that all of remaining humanity be so ignorant of the way that the cybernetic Partials work? These lapses felt more like plot contrivances than anything else–meant to keep the story moving, even if at the expense of the book’s overall soundness.

None of this would have bothered me had the character relationships been richer, or deeper. Kira’s a well-drawn character, but she’s essentially the only one. Her love interest is completely flat; their interactions totally lacked in chemistry and had a creepy undercurrent I couldn’t quite pin down. Her relationships with her friends should have had a familial closeness thanks to their extreme living conditions, but instead felt contrived. When Kira vows to save her friend’s unborn child, her reasoning never seemed to transcend “because baby!” Richer character interactions and less time spent describing viral identification in a lab (a process never really discussed convincingly for me) would have helped quite a bit.

This was especially true in the case of Kira’s interactions with Samm, the captured Partial who shows up halfway through. Wells begins to hint at a relationship or some sort of chemistry between the two, but the novel ends with this, and many other threads, largely undeveloped. The story ultimately failed to satisfy. I’m not one of those readers who utterly loathes a cliffhanger, but I do like to see the characters evolve appreciably within a volume. That didn’t quite happen here. Both Kira and Samm’s growth felt forestalled for later volumes.

In this way, Partials repeats the mistakes of many adult sci-fi novels: unrealistic dialogue; stiff or simplistic characterization. And while Wells hints at complexity and richness, few aspects of Partials felt truly mature for me. But let’s be frank: this is meant to be movie-style SF, where gritty images and tense scenes drive the plot rather than totally sound worldbuilding or in-depth characterization. I suspect Wells’ work will attract its fair share of fans–those who like dark, serious sci-fi will find a lot to like within its pages.

Partials comes out on February 28th. It’s available for preorder now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local indie bookstore.