We picked up these two, somewhat older books, at the library on a summer run.
I've loved non-fiction stories about expeditions to the Arctic (Sir Ernest Shackleton and Sir John Franklin) and Antarctic, so this book's cover caught my attention.
Visually it reminded me more than a little of the Jaws movie poster. My son read it, and said it was "pretty good." No explanation for why people turn on machines, just that they do, and life is miserable, ever after. Having once had a school assignment to make a pound cake the colonial American way, creaming the butter and sugar by hand -- it takes an hour(!!) -- my son could relate to non-electric appliance era misery.
The MC is a "Nothing Girl" who is free of the tribalism that has gripped the ship (three tribes - cooks, engineers and officers), because she belongs to no tribe. The secondary character is a boy who's been brainwashed by the anti-machinists to believe that the ship needs to be destroyed, and he's planted on the ice to be rescued and infiltrate the crew.
The second one I picked up on the same library run, in part because it was a book 1, and I recognized it from the video game. I've always been interested in how games get turned into prose, as I know it's likely to catch my son's attention -- fast.
The first part of the book is written in 3rd person limited POV, because only the MC is able to resist the invaders' mind control. At that point in the book, no one else has a POV, literally.
When he meets up with other kids his age who can resist the aliens' mind control, the story is told in 3rd omniscient POV. My son said the switch was "weird" and he wasn't sure what was going on, at first, but he figured out the reasoning for it, eventually.
He was fascinated by the aliens. He likened them to the "squids" in The Matrix. It's dystopian because aliens have taken over the world, turning people into a zombie-like workforce for a soon to-be-discovered purpose. If you've played the game, you know what that is.
A good read of a video game's backstory.
