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Cinder

 


As I was casting about looking for something to read, my wife pointed me in the direction of a book she had purchased from a local book store: Cinder by Marissa Meyer. From the name and the cover, it was obvious to me that this was a retelling of Cinderella. “Isn’t that like a Cinderella story?” I said with faint distain. “It is and it isn’t,” she said. “It is science fiction.” Like that was supposed to make up for it. Cinderella is not my favorite story. I probably liked it well enough when I was seven or eight and first saw the Disney version. But there have been sooooo many versions since (and before) in movies and television that I am pretty sick and tired of Cinderella. It almost seems like a rite of passage for an actress to play Cinderella. Actresses who have played Cinderella include Leslie Caron, Hillary Duff, Julie Andrews, Lilly James, Drew Barrymore, Brandy Norwood, Selena Gomez, Leslie Ann Warren, Mary Pickford, Anne Hathaway, Deanna Durbin (and let’s not forget, Jerry Lewis). Look, the original story is okay, but it’s just not such a great story that I want to hear it retold over and over again. It’s not like, say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I never get tired of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I will watch any production of it).

But my wife recommended it. It was there. I needed something to read, ergo, I read it. Okay . . .  I liked it. The story isn’t really a retelling of Cinderella, any more than say, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is a retelling of The Lord of the Rings. There are obvious parallels right from the beginning. We have a downtrodden girl, with a horrible step-mother. Two step sisters who are getting ready for a grand ball. The girl meets the prince. Despite the fact that this is set many years into the future with androids and cyborgs, you might be saying, obviously this is Cinderella. But then the story veers off into uncharted waters and novel subplots.

The nations, after years of war have consolidated into just six on Earth and one on the moon. The nations on Earth get along just fine. It is the Moon that is the problem. The queen of Luna is powerful and belligerent, threatening war unless she gets her way. What she wants is to marry the young prince and become empress of the Eastern Confederation. From there we can see that it is a short step to world domination by her. The young prince Kai must walk a tightrope of diplomacy to try to find the lessor of evils. Add to this a deadly plague to which the people of the moon are immune and the race for a vaccine. Cinder, of course, is dropped right in the middle of this, and we watch her walk her own tightrope between the prince, her stepmother, and the research doctor who knows too much about her.

Meyer is playing with the idea of prejudice here. We identify with Cinder. Obviously, she is as human as can be, but she is an outcast being part machine. She is reviled, with limited rights. She stews about the fact that the prince doesn’t know she is a cyborg, that he won’t have any regard for her if he finds out. But she already knows she has no future with the prince, so why doesn’t she stop wringing her hands and just TELL HIM ALREADY! As an audience member, this is what I keep wanting to yell to her. Of course, humans don’t always do the logical thing, and despite what everybody tells her, Cinder is human.

To use a fairy tale as a jumping off point for a new story is a solid idea as long as the new story is sound. The movie Forbidden Planet is supposedly a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, though you wouldn’t notice the similarities unless you were looking for them. The source material for a story is less important than the execution. Bad writing is bad writing, and good writing is good writing, wherever the idea came from.  

(My science fiction novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).

Link to Star Liner

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