I’m just a girl with a shark’s heart.

Ming-fucking-mong.

I don’t necessarily know what that means (can anyone really trust urbandictionary nowadays?) or if I actually understood what Anais was talking about half the time but if there’s one thing I’m certain, my cuss vocabulary expanded a few pages more thanks to this book. And ming-fucking-mong is a new favorite.

Sometimes, you can just tell from the cover/title combo. Hard as we may try to not judge books by their covers, we do. And this book looks pretty intimidating. Any of The Panopticon’s edition appears to promise a lobotomy in the form of distressing accounts, evocative, visceral prose and hours of guessing and second guessing whether you’re understanding things right and what it says about you. 

And since I’m staring so intensely at my screen right now it would’ve called the authorities if it could, I think this delivered on those promises, maybe more. It varies for every reader of course, but Fagan managed to satisfy some latent fragments in my personality. Unfortunately it also left gaping holes of dissatisfaction from my end. Because this was not an easy adventure, structurally and thematically, to get into and the emotional payoff tepid, murky and this side of confusing. So overall...

”Most of us spend our lives waiting for something. The last thing we wait for is to die.”

The thing with being a rabid consumer of all things pop culture is that it takes a bit of effort not to get distracted whenever you recognise the similarities. And while these are probably largely unintentional on the part of the author, any scene or exchange feels palpably reminiscent from a different book, any character seems like an amalgam of this movie hero and another’s protagonist. This didn’t necessarily prevent me from enjoying this book, but it did get a little exhausting. 

The plot operates with some of the elements in Gattaca andElysium with shades of Neal Shusterman’s Unwind series in the latter half. Every time Thomas Zed walks in, I get a mental picture of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons without fail. And since this is “hard” science fiction (a sub-genre I just learned), I had to tap back into my old Molecular Biology lessons. Because Ouellette knows kung-fu. Science Kung-fu.

So yes, exhausting.