Skip to main content

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Trip Home

  My wife and I recently returned from a trip to New York to visit my son and his wife. What follows is an excerpt of my notes from that trip. Departure day. So we and the kids (adult kids) leave by 5:30 AM. These “kids” are night owls. They rarely wake before 10:00 if they don’t have to, so we appreciate the sacrifice. Daughter-in-Law (DIL) drove us the 30 minutes to the train station. Hugs and good-byes for her (we love DIL. DIL is an irresistible force). Son navigates us a route to the platform with fewer stairs than the way we came. We get a ticket and get on the train headed for the big city and Grand Central Station. I soon realize that this train is not an express train like the one we took coming out. Instead of taking a little over an hour like we did before, this one would take a little over an hour and a half. We stop at places with names like Cold Springs and Peekskill (on this trip we saw a lot of place names that ended in “kill” including Kaatskill, i.e. Catskill, and
2 comments
Read more

That 70's Decade

  Can a decade become a caricature? My teen years were in the 1970’s and none of us who lived through the 70’s thought our decade was going to be a figure of fun. When you are a part of it, you don’t realize what people are going to make fun of later. I think there are two reasons why people snicker when the 70’s are mentioned: clothing styles and Disco. Both things could be called extensions of trends that started in the 60’s. When the hippy styles of the 60’s became more formalized for the dance floor, the result was (in hindsight) rather bizarre. They did not seem bizarre at the time. People following present fashion trends never understand that they are wearing something that will be laughed at in ten years. Yes, I did have a pair of bell-bottom blue jeans (are they making a comeback?) The mere mention of the 1970’s conjures up someone in a ridiculous pose wearing a disco suit. We who lived through the 70’s just went about our normal life. There were quite a lot of things that ha
Post a Comment
Read more

Tyranny of the Masses

  I was listening to Benjamin Netanyahu on the radio. He was justifying his change in the law that removed power from the Israeli Supreme Court, saying that it was the will of the people. Majority rules. This made me think of “Tyranny of the masses,” a concept that notes: just because a majority of people are for something, that doesn’t make it right. I am sure you can think of historical examples where the people of a country supported a policy that was demonstrably wrong. When everything is completely governed by majority rule, the rights of the minority can be subverted by the majority. The framers of our American Constitution knew this, and tried to put in some checks and balances into our system of government. This was to guard against all forms of tyranny whether from a dictator, or from tyranny of the masses. One of those checks is that we have a representative government. The people themselves don’t pass laws, but instead elect representatives at the federal and local level t
Post a Comment
Read more