Sometimes You Don’t Need to Know the Answers to Know What to Do

First the bad news.  Author Yancey never answers the questions of what the aliens were doing, why they invaded Earth, why they killed off so many, why they were so consistently cruel.  For the good news, most of our main characters survive and the tiny remnants of civilization remain.

Characters

Yancey developed his main characters, Cassey, Ringer, Ben, Evan and Sam, in the first two books and does very little to further them in The Last Star.  We do see Ringer developing tentative alliance with Cassey, and all the older characters keep trying to figure out what is going on, the alien’s plan and purpose.

The three main human characters, Cassie, Ben and Ringer, are confused and torn, angry and frustrated.  This feels real.  I don’t understand Ringer’s attitude towards Cassie, a little contemptuous until the end, but it fits her overall sense of superiority.  Ben is realistic, never quite sure of himself, never quite hopeful, never ready to give up, looking for people to love.

Evan is the saddest character, neither fully alien nor fully human.  Sam is stubborn.

Writing Style

The 5th Wave flows very well.  We have a start and an end and events and characters move one into the other.  The Infinite Sea takes a very different approach with mostly new characters and tone.  The Last Star is jerkier with pacing issues and diversions that don’t add much.

Yancey uses multiple points of view in The Last Star which gives more background and depth but also makes it less even.  The first POV character is the priest Silencer whom we re-encounter later as a 3rd party.  A few of the POV switches are disjointed.

The mood changes over the course of the series.  The 5th Wave characters are sad, frightened.  Cassie was terrified of being the last human and horrified that she had killed the crucifix soldier but we ended hopeful because Cassie and Evan ally and plan.   The Infinite Sea is darker as we see depths of cruelty and misery, but the characters are determined and will fight back.   The Infinite Sea has a sense of hopelessness in the beginning that changes; in the end we once more see hope albeit with sadness, loss and worry.

Plot Problems (Spoilers)

The ending is a bit too tidy.  In part it satisfies because we see hope for the future, a seed of family, community, learning.

Evan tells Ben there are more military bases than just the one in Ohio, and they also had been training kids to kill.  Evan takes his personal mission to clean up all these bases, killing thousands of indoctrinated kid soldiers.  The novel stops with Evan walking into the sunset, off to kill people while Ringer and Ben create a family and teach trust the hard way.

(Spoiler) The bomb requires one to breath in order to activate, which means the mother ship must have air.  Hmm.  If aliens are incorporeal why is there air?

(Spoiler)  Aliens embedded the program/personality/augmentation into Evan when he was in his mother’s womb, then activated it when he hit puberty.  At least some of the other Silencers and military leaders are adult humans.  Were they embedded as adults?  Or were their alien personalities (real or artificial) formed earlier?  If earlier then where was the mother ship all this time?

(Spoiler)  The Silencers expect to be evacuated before the aliens bomb every city and town on Earth.  Vosch tells Ringer that there are only 12 of the evacuation pods and none of the Silencers are going to the mother ship.  (Vosch lies all the time so we cannot know whether this is true.  It is true that he has a pod.)  So what are the Silencers going to do?  If they die in the bombardment then the 5th wave is done; if they lived then they too are betrayed.  Evan believes the Silencers would move to destroy the remaining bases but I don’t see the connection.  If I were a Silencer and my ticket home got torn up I’d fade into the background and be human.

(Spoiler)  Vosch has Evan’s character mind wiped, then reloads only the alien part with the result that alien Evan is solely a killer, no shred of personality or anything else.  Does that tell us the aliens are just killers?  Nothing else?  From a plot perspective, how did Ringer and Ben figure out which of the 10,000 plus personalities to reload?

There are other too-neat or unrealistic plot issues, but mostly they don’t get in the way of a solid book.

What Were the Aliens Doing?

Option 1.  Destroy Trust to Destroy Civilization

Ringer ends up believing the aliens are trying to reduce human populations and permanently twisting us to never trust, never again come together as community, never again build civilization, never again take over the earth and destroy other living creatures. Vosch hints at this with her although he never came out and agreed.  Destroying trust to destroy humanity while leaving a few humans alive is certainly one possibility, but it doesn’t make sense.

True, the aliens used unbearably cruel methods to kill the survivors of the first four waves.  They are betrayal itself, first of all the people who died, then of their children/soldiers and weaponized toddlers; even their Silencers are to be betrayed by abandonment and bombardment.

But consider this.  If you do not yourself witness small groups dying because they brought a booby-trapped child inside their home, would you still learn the lesson to trust no one?  I suppose if everyone who does trust dies, then the remaining survivors may have less innate tendency to trust and form communities (assuming there is some genetic factor behind trust).  But overall I don’t see this working.

I don’t believe the no-trust rule would settle permanently into our collective hearts.  People are hardwired to form families, to reach for something more than themselves, to build communities.  We need trust to have children, trust to form families.  Small families turn into larger family groups, then tribes, then hello civilization.  We could end up with Stone Age family group sizes but I don’t see how this could end up permanent.  The aliens would have to re-teach the lesson every few hundred years.

Last, for a group that supposedly venerates life they sure kill a lot of people.

Option 2.  Keep a Small Number of People for Hosts, aka Kill the Humans and Take Over

Evan believes that he is an alien personality downloaded into a human host.  He discusses the aliens’ origin and names with Vosh and is convinced that his purpose was to kill enough humans for the aliens to take over Earth.

This option makes more sense to me than number 1, although it begs the question how the aliens would operate without bodies and why they needed a planet if they were pure thought.

Option 3.  Aliens are Killers First Last and Always

Vosh strips out the human Evan leaving only alien Evan.  That stripped Evan is a killer, nothing else, no goal other than to kill everyone he can.  If this is typical alien mind, then the aliens are here to kill.  Perhaps they are just plain evil.

Option 4.  Something Else

It’s possible the entire story is a lie, that the aliens do in fact have bodies and are in fact trying to kill off everyone so they can take over the planet free of annoying humans.  Or something else, pick your favorite.

Ultimately

In the end it doesn’t matter why the aliens did what they did.  We don’t know and that’s probably Yancey’s purpose here.  The characters wouldn’t know.

If the purpose were to destroy trust – permanently – then Ringers and Ben’s determination to live with trust, to form community, to regain civilization would be the answer.  And if the purpose were to take over Earth, then Ringer and Ben’s nascent community and others with like minds would be bulwark against that takeover.

We don’t need to know the answer to enjoy the novel and the series, and the guessing adds to the sense of sorrow and terror that Cassie and Ringer and Ben and Sam and Evan would feel.

Overall

I can’t give The Last Star 5 stars, mostly because it doesn’t flow as well as it should and because the characters don’t change much.  It is otherwise enjoyable and thought-provoking.

4 Stars