![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyand that's the Lockwood & Co. books by Stroud. They're pretty fun if you read them fast enough not to notice the shaky worldbuilding!
So, the easiest is the technology. This book is apparently set in the present day... but a present day without any personal computers or related tech, probably because the author didn't want the characters to be able to use cell phones and the internet. Fair enough, and if The Problem of widespread mass hauntings was worldwide we might be able to handwave it away as "they've had other things to worry about" - except it's made pretty clear that it's limited to the British Isles, so there's just no excuse for it. And it would've been just as easy to just set the book in the 1960s or 1980s if that's as far as their tech gets! Just say upfront that the book takes place in the past, add a few historical in-jokes, and call it a day.
The second thing, which would be a lot harder to fix, is... well, look. It's a children's series. You have to get rid of the adults somehow or else there can't be any story. No parents would let their kids do this job, night after night, if there was any choice! Even bad parents would have some qualms! (A shockingly high percentage of our named cast are sole survivors.)
Now, I can accept, as a necessary genre convention, that children need to be on the front lines of this war because they're the only ones - with vanishingly few exceptions* - who can actually see ghosts and therefore fight them effectively. I can accept that older teens in this business might be allowed to live independently and that Lucy might be on poor enough terms with her family that she barely keeps in touch with them at all. I can even accept that ghost-fighting Agents, once employed in the business, might be largely exempt from compulsory education laws and that there might be little to no provision to providing them with adequate psychological care or continuing education once they age out. Certainly they don't seem to be paid very much.
But what really breaks my disbelief is the fact that Anthony Lockwood apparently has been living in a house all on his own since his older sister died when he was nine. His older sister, who at fifteen seems to have been his sole caregiver since the death of their parentsin a car crash by brutal cover-up. As near as I can tell, he doesn't even have a guardian to help him manage his inheritance, which might be part of why they're always about to run out of cash.
And no, do not point me at historical precedent! It does not seem likely that child protection laws backslid so much since the mid-20th century! (Again, this could really have been a little easier to accept with an earlier setting date. If the series is set in the 1950s, say, then we can believe that technology is 1950s level and that child labor laws, at least for this field, are no better than they were in the early 1900s. It's still a bit implausible that a preteen child would be allowed to live wholly independently without so much as a social worker checking in once in a while, but the rest of it could kinda slide due to the aforementioned reality of writing children's fiction.)
Which brings us to the third point, and this really cannot be handwaved at all, not even by playing with the timeline. Now, I'll interrupt myself to say that Stroud is pretty good with his foreshadowing. It's a fine line between insulting your readers and baffling them, and he manages to walk it pretty neatly. In particular, he mentions heroic Marissa Fittes** consistently enough that it definitely raises the question of "okay, but is she the big bad?" but not so often that it answers it before the correct time.
So, yes, it turns out that the two people credited with finding a solution to the ghost Problem were the ones responsible for causing and perpetuating it this entire time through their explorations of the immediate afterlife. And it certainly is a dramatic scene when one of our main characters declares that all the evidence that they fixed these problems, if looked at properly, shows that wherever those two kids went 50 years ago, ghosts followed!
Except, yeah, if he could figure that out with a determined archive crawl, so could literally anybody else. And people would have figured it out sometime in the past 50 years. Those people and their conclusions possibly could have been written off by the mainstream as tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists... except that in the past 50-odd decades the two major agencies plus the Orpheus Society have all been increasing their excursions. When you have dozens and scores and potentially hundreds or thousands of people in the know, sooner or later somebody's gonna talk. I don't care how much you've bribed them or threatened them, eventually you gotta expect them to make that gamble - or at least grow a conscience, because our main characters certainly were not the first ones to figure out that these little trips have been worsening the ghost infestation. Remember, if the secret is big enough to kill over, it's big enough to try to spill. (Alternatively, somebody somewhere would've been sneaking out some of that nifty tech, like the ghost-seeing goggles, to the weirdo collectors and cults. Really, those alone are a fucking gamechanger, because they can be used by adults. Pros and cons of hiring adults instead of children. Hm. Con: Children are easier to control and you can pay them less. Pro: Yeah, but you have to train them and then they're gone in a few short years. With the googles, you could keep them on in a useful capacity at least a little bit longer.)
* We meet two naturally ghost-seeing adults in the books, though presumably the real Penelope Fittes also would've been one if she hadn't been murdered and her body possessed. The other only reveals his ability by mistake in his very last on-page appearance, blink and you'll miss it. In most cases I'd say that the existence of two rarities in fiction suggests it's not so rare after all, but given the two we meet were working together I'll let it pass this time. And maybe he has ghost-seeing contact lenses. We did already find ghost-seeing goggles, after all.
** Sidenote on Marissa - I know she's the villain of the piece, and a thoroughly rotten piece of work, but you gotta feel a bit sorry for her. Our narrator explicitly compares Marissa's ghost guide to a squid, with Marissa ensnared in its tentacles, and remarks that she's similar to the victim of particularly nasty ghost they'd dispatched earlier in the same book, who had been psychically manipulated to the point where he wouldn't eat and had to be chained up to keep from trying to off himself with whatever was closest to hand. Marissa's face when speaking to "Ezekial" is described as being both full of adoration but also fear. She's been in the clutches of this thing since her childhood, obviously both groomed and isolated - well, the isolation wouldn't have taken much, not if she was running around prattling about her dear ghost friend in those pre-Problem days. You have to wonder what, exactly, cause the split between her and her adolescent ghost-hunting partner Tom Rotwell, but I would not be surprised if Ezekial went out of his way to hammer a wedge between them.
Complaining aside, I liked these a lot and will likely re-read them. Real Bartimaeus vibes, except without the footnotes and with only one POV. Also, I didn't question that worldbuilding nearly as much, though that doesn't mean I shouldn't have.
So, the easiest is the technology. This book is apparently set in the present day... but a present day without any personal computers or related tech, probably because the author didn't want the characters to be able to use cell phones and the internet. Fair enough, and if The Problem of widespread mass hauntings was worldwide we might be able to handwave it away as "they've had other things to worry about" - except it's made pretty clear that it's limited to the British Isles, so there's just no excuse for it. And it would've been just as easy to just set the book in the 1960s or 1980s if that's as far as their tech gets! Just say upfront that the book takes place in the past, add a few historical in-jokes, and call it a day.
The second thing, which would be a lot harder to fix, is... well, look. It's a children's series. You have to get rid of the adults somehow or else there can't be any story. No parents would let their kids do this job, night after night, if there was any choice! Even bad parents would have some qualms! (A shockingly high percentage of our named cast are sole survivors.)
Now, I can accept, as a necessary genre convention, that children need to be on the front lines of this war because they're the only ones - with vanishingly few exceptions* - who can actually see ghosts and therefore fight them effectively. I can accept that older teens in this business might be allowed to live independently and that Lucy might be on poor enough terms with her family that she barely keeps in touch with them at all. I can even accept that ghost-fighting Agents, once employed in the business, might be largely exempt from compulsory education laws and that there might be little to no provision to providing them with adequate psychological care or continuing education once they age out. Certainly they don't seem to be paid very much.
But what really breaks my disbelief is the fact that Anthony Lockwood apparently has been living in a house all on his own since his older sister died when he was nine. His older sister, who at fifteen seems to have been his sole caregiver since the death of their parents
And no, do not point me at historical precedent! It does not seem likely that child protection laws backslid so much since the mid-20th century! (Again, this could really have been a little easier to accept with an earlier setting date. If the series is set in the 1950s, say, then we can believe that technology is 1950s level and that child labor laws, at least for this field, are no better than they were in the early 1900s. It's still a bit implausible that a preteen child would be allowed to live wholly independently without so much as a social worker checking in once in a while, but the rest of it could kinda slide due to the aforementioned reality of writing children's fiction.)
Which brings us to the third point, and this really cannot be handwaved at all, not even by playing with the timeline. Now, I'll interrupt myself to say that Stroud is pretty good with his foreshadowing. It's a fine line between insulting your readers and baffling them, and he manages to walk it pretty neatly. In particular, he mentions heroic Marissa Fittes** consistently enough that it definitely raises the question of "okay, but is she the big bad?" but not so often that it answers it before the correct time.
So, yes, it turns out that the two people credited with finding a solution to the ghost Problem were the ones responsible for causing and perpetuating it this entire time through their explorations of the immediate afterlife. And it certainly is a dramatic scene when one of our main characters declares that all the evidence that they fixed these problems, if looked at properly, shows that wherever those two kids went 50 years ago, ghosts followed!
Except, yeah, if he could figure that out with a determined archive crawl, so could literally anybody else. And people would have figured it out sometime in the past 50 years. Those people and their conclusions possibly could have been written off by the mainstream as tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists... except that in the past 50-odd decades the two major agencies plus the Orpheus Society have all been increasing their excursions. When you have dozens and scores and potentially hundreds or thousands of people in the know, sooner or later somebody's gonna talk. I don't care how much you've bribed them or threatened them, eventually you gotta expect them to make that gamble - or at least grow a conscience, because our main characters certainly were not the first ones to figure out that these little trips have been worsening the ghost infestation. Remember, if the secret is big enough to kill over, it's big enough to try to spill. (Alternatively, somebody somewhere would've been sneaking out some of that nifty tech, like the ghost-seeing goggles, to the weirdo collectors and cults. Really, those alone are a fucking gamechanger, because they can be used by adults. Pros and cons of hiring adults instead of children. Hm. Con: Children are easier to control and you can pay them less. Pro: Yeah, but you have to train them and then they're gone in a few short years. With the googles, you could keep them on in a useful capacity at least a little bit longer.)
* We meet two naturally ghost-seeing adults in the books, though presumably the real Penelope Fittes also would've been one if she hadn't been murdered and her body possessed. The other only reveals his ability by mistake in his very last on-page appearance, blink and you'll miss it. In most cases I'd say that the existence of two rarities in fiction suggests it's not so rare after all, but given the two we meet were working together I'll let it pass this time. And maybe he has ghost-seeing contact lenses. We did already find ghost-seeing goggles, after all.
** Sidenote on Marissa - I know she's the villain of the piece, and a thoroughly rotten piece of work, but you gotta feel a bit sorry for her. Our narrator explicitly compares Marissa's ghost guide to a squid, with Marissa ensnared in its tentacles, and remarks that she's similar to the victim of particularly nasty ghost they'd dispatched earlier in the same book, who had been psychically manipulated to the point where he wouldn't eat and had to be chained up to keep from trying to off himself with whatever was closest to hand. Marissa's face when speaking to "Ezekial" is described as being both full of adoration but also fear. She's been in the clutches of this thing since her childhood, obviously both groomed and isolated - well, the isolation wouldn't have taken much, not if she was running around prattling about her dear ghost friend in those pre-Problem days. You have to wonder what, exactly, cause the split between her and her adolescent ghost-hunting partner Tom Rotwell, but I would not be surprised if Ezekial went out of his way to hammer a wedge between them.
Complaining aside, I liked these a lot and will likely re-read them. Real Bartimaeus vibes, except without the footnotes and with only one POV. Also, I didn't question that worldbuilding nearly as much, though that doesn't mean I shouldn't have.
