The Defectives Review
Danmei Review: Can Ci Pin | Imperfections | The Defectives by Priest
Is it me or is being a military commander a terrible job to have? Whenever I watch a show or read a book involving military commanders they tend to find themselves in an awful predicament. They're expected to wage wars and defend the citizens, but whenever they do so they are accused of being bloodthirsty. It’s a lose-lose situation. If they win they’re seen as violent and power hungry. If they lose they’re seen as incompetent. How exactly are they suppose to defend a region? Should they use hugs and kisses? Perhaps they can cuddle their enemIes to death?
Normal people don’t crave the massive destruction and blood shed that comes with war. However, once one begins of course there will be casualties. This is why leaders should do more to prevent wars in the first place. Instead the kings and politicians try to find ways to blame the soldiers. They blame the men and women forced onto the battlefield by their bad decisions, greed and corruption.
The Story
Lin Jingheng is the Commander of the Silver Fortress, an elite military force within the Interstellar Union. He lives in an era of technical advancement where mankind has long ventured out into the stars and colonized them. However, he faces some of the same issues that generals of the past did. People are wary of him and the power he holds.
What makes things worse is that there’s an AI, known as Eden, and most people are completely comfortable letting this AI control every aspect of their lives. It controls their environment, monitors their actions, their vitals and can automatically adjust their mood.
Lin Jingheng's unwillingness to let Eden in as deeply as the rest of the population is seen as suspicious. Why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide? It’s a faulty argument. The kind you can see play out in real life when people don’t understand the risk of such actions.
Accused of treason he’s ordered to disarm and return to the capital planet to face the charges against him. Along the way he encounters several mishaps and is ultimately declared dead. The Interstellar Union quickly changes its tune and proclaims him a fallen hero, but it’s too late because one of their greatest protectors is now gone.
Five years later the story shifts to the planet of Beijing-β in the Eighth Galaxy. The Eighth Galaxy is where the dregs of society live. It lacks resources and is filled with people who have been deemed deffective because their brains can’t accept Eden. It’s known as Vacucerebral Syndrome or Empty Brain Syndrome. This inability to smoothly integrate with the current technology has led to these people being cast aside by the citizens of the first seven galaxies and their leaders.
When a teenage girl gets involved in an attempted kidnapping assistance comes in the form of a local gang. The gang leader, a man known as B4 or Lin, calls in the principle of her school.
Headmaster Lu Bixing is a young man with grand plans of educating the youth of the Eighth Galaxy. These plans aren’t going well due to a variety of reasons which include; delinquent students, and a lack of both teachers and funding. He keeps trying though even when it mean pestering his acquaintances for money.
Through a series of strange coincidences Lin, Lu Bixing, his father and some of his wayward students all end up together as the political situation becomes unstable. They will face many difficult decisions as groups with different ideologies emerge to vie for power. From self-appointed kings to insect worshiping space pirates, they’re all ready to wage war for their beliefs.
Who’s it For?
The novel is a sprawling sci-fi epic that spans across several galaxies and decades. Philosophical questions about the use of artificial intelligence as well as what it means to be human are raised and examined in the story. If you’re a fan of sci-fi, action and political intrigue with a thread of romance woven throughout you can give this web novel a try.
This isn’t a light fluffy romance, but then again Priest isn’t known for those. She tends to write more complicated stories filled with equally complicated characters. Characters with tragic backstories, unique personalities or who act in morally ambiguous ways. If you’re a fan of her previous work you’ll probably enjoy this novel too.
The story deals with power struggles on an intergalactic scale and the losses can be tremendous. It isn’t all dark and dreary, but fictional war can also be depressing so consider whether you can handle this.
The Romance
It’s obvious from the start that there’s something between Lin and Lu Bixing. The connection is there, but nature of it remains a mystery in the beginning. Is it gratitude, attraction or is there something else going on?
I like the way their relationship evolves over time. Neither of them remain the same and the story does a good job of showing those changes. This novel also has one of the sweetest letters, written from one character to another, that I’ve ever seen.
The Downsides
The biggest downside is that the novel is very long and intricate. There’s a lot of exposition filled with information that you need to know in order to understand the story. It therefore requires you to invest more time. Some readers may find this boring, especially in the beginning.
Next there are a couple of huge coincidences. They don’t ruin the story or anything like that, but the odds of these events happening are astronomically low.
As a sci-fi geek I wanted the author to go into more detail about some of the technology and how everything is supposed to work. I would have liked to see better descriptions of things like the mechs. For example, there’s an AI that can transform into a human shaped body, an arm, or an emergency escape pod. My overthinking brain kept complaining about the conservation of matter and saying that things can’t have such drastic changes in size. This is a sci-fi story not a magical one. The brief explanation that it’s made of “transformable material” was too little too late for me. However, this is just me nitpicking and isn’t a big deal.
Final Thoughts
The high stakes nature of The Defectives drew me in. With so many interesting characters I had to stick around to find out what would happen to them all. It has great female characters and there are a lot of highs and lows. I loved it, so I would definitely recommend it to other fans of danmei.