A few months ago, I read Biting the Sun, a two part novel (originally published as two separate novellas) about a girl in a pseudo-utopian society in which humans have transcended the mystery of life and have the capacity to reincarnate dead souls into new and exciting bodies, effectively cheating death for eternity.

I’ll admit that when my friend lent the book, I was skeptical at the first mention of utopian society.  But this book didn’t focus on the perfect, utopian parts of society nearly as much as I expected it to.  It was a thrilling read with a charismatic, confused, and dynamic main character.

I don’t want to give away too much, but I feel okay writing about the basic premise.  The book never gives you a full description of humanity in this era, but the reader can infer that mankind isn’t in the best of times - not in the conventional sense.  Society in this region has been restricted to cities protected by domes from the outside environment.  Our main character starts out in Four BEE, but also moves around to Four BAA and Four BOO, suggesting that this region - and many other regions throughout the world - have been categorized and fall under a higher authority, although this authority never appears in the book.

Humans had previously reached such a level of technological prowess to created what they called Quasi-Robots, or Q-R’s.  Q-Rs were complete, biologically functioning humans, but they couldn’t be endowed with a Life Spark - the book’s analog to the human soul.  As such, the Q-Rs were used to manage and keep order to society, while natural born humans enjoyed the pleasures of life granted to them by the advanced industrial society they lived in.

The main character is predominantly female (since people get new bodies quite often after dying, they frequently change sex, but many prefer to trend one way or another), and tells the story in the first person.  Her name is never given, but is rather referred to by her culture’s slang identifiers, such as ooma, a word analogous to “dear”.  Most of these slang words are identified with the Jang, the rebellious, teenage stage in social evolution.  Unsatisfied with her superficial Jang life, the main character attempts to find several jobs until she is eventually sent to the outside world for an archeological dig.  Experiencing the real world, with real air, mountains, water, and weather for the first time, she will never fit back into her synthetic society without experiencing the outdoors again.  This is the premise of her internal and external conflict that feeds the rest of the book, causing her to rebel against society through violence, crime, and heresy - all of which were unheard of for centuries. 

This book is simply a fun, addictive read. The style of its ‘goodness’ is somewhat more like Harry Potter than, say, The Sound and the Fury.  I doubt that in a few decades, university literary circles will be dissecting Biting the Sun for it’s thick metaphors and deep meaning (because I don’t think there’s much of that in the book).  But this doesn’t make it any less of a novel, and you can find a lot of pleasure just curling up on a couch for a few days and letting your mind fall into a fantasy novel for what may be the first time in a long time.  I know it was for me - I hadn’t had the opportunity to read any fantasy books in far too long.

You can read a sample from Amazon’s book reader here.  It’s mostly pages from the first chapter, which I admittedly found slower than the rest of the book, but it’s still worth investigating Lee’s style.  I highly suggest this book to anyone who loves fantasy, and maybe hasn’t had a chance to read it in a while.

Posted in Reviews Tagged: Analysis, Literature, Reviews