This book cracked me up. I kept seeing scenes from it playing out in my mind's eye with really bad special effects and cardboard props, like an episode of Red Dwarf, or an early sci-fi flick. Especially the part where the eeeeevil doctor reveals the government plot while standing in front of a bank of television screens displaying.... nothing.... but stairs.... Ooh! We could make a Hedgehog Rumpus movie of it. I'll play Peter, I'm good at going into trances.
Hee. What can I say, I thought it was silly. It read very much like a historical relic to me, from a time when people were still kind of obsessed with Skinner and behaviorism and operant conditioning and the idea that We have no souls! We have no real free will! Thoughts and beliefs don't really guide our actions, but we're all products of conditioning whether we know it or not! And we can all be trained to do pretty much anything, if someone really wanted to make us!
I mean, I guess I believe that some of that is true, and I'm pretty sure there's been some interesting government research into mind control and conditioning, but the book felt wildly dated because of its hyperbole. They FORGOT how to distinguish between red and green because they didn't NEED to in order to get food? That's ridiculous. What, did the whole world start to look black and white to them? To be honest I don't think Sleator tried hard enough with the idea. It sort of seems like he felt like the premise of the book was terrifying enough, and so he didn't have to do very much to flesh it out.
I wanted MUCH more about the stairs, and what it felt like to be trapped in an place that was like an Escher painting, and how awful it must have been to constantly feel like you're on the verge of falling, both because of the twisty stairs themselves and because surely looking at nothing but twisty stairs would give you terrible dizziness and vertigo. It sounds absolutely horrifying to me, and after a few pages the stairs just became sort of normal.
And then I wanted more about the conditioning, too, because that's what it's all about (you put your right knee in, you take your right knee out....) and it just seemed to happen too quickly and easily, without very much understanding of what it was like for any of the characters. I just think if Sleator wanted this to be a psychological thriller, it could have been a lot more thrilling.
I did really like the last line, though. (Because it was funny.)
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