Red Queen

“It’s been going on for the better part of the last hundred years. I don’t think it should even be called a war anymore, but there isn’t a word for this higher form of destruction.”

This passage from Chapter 3 highlights the war that is the backdrop conflict of Red Queen. The amount of destruction alluded to grounds the novel in the dystopian genre, implying enough of the world has been affected to qualify as a fall of society. These lines also call to the limitations of language. Mare questions whether war is the right word to describe the conflict, but she has no better term because one has not entered the language yet.

“Just when I think there could be nothing more fantastic than this place, I look closer at the Silvers and remember exactly who they are. The little girl is a telky, levitating the apple ten feet into the air to feed the long-necked beast. A florist runs his hands through a pot of white flowers and they explode into growth, curling around his elbows. He’s a greeny, a manipulator of plants and the earth. A pair of nymphs sits by the fountain, lazily entertaining children with floating orbs of water. One of them has orange hair and hateful eyes, even while kids mill around him. All over the square, every type of Silver goes about their extraordinary lives. There are so many, each one grand and wonderful and powerful and so far removed from the world I know.”

Mare observes the Silvers up close for the first time, which illustrates the marked differences in how Reds and Silvers live. Various Silver powers are also shown. The telky is short for telekinesis, the ability to move objects with the mind. Greeny refers to plants, and nymphs get their name from the mythological nature spirits that inhabit the water. This is also the first place where it becomes clear that Silvers need preexisting material to manipulate, but Mare isn’t aware of that yet.

“He bats the box like hitting the damn thing can suddenly bring light and warmth and hope back to us. His actions become more harried, more desperate, and anger radiates from him. Not at me or Gisa but the world. Long ago he called us ants, Red ants burning in the light of a Silver sun. Destroyed by the greatness of others, losing the battle for our right to exist because we are not special. We did not evolve like them, with powers and strengths beyond our limited imaginations. We stayed the same, stagnant in our own bodies. The world changed around us and we stayed the same.”

These lines come after the power has gone out at Mare’s house. While her father tries desperately to turn the electricity back on, Mare lays out the beaten-down mindset of Reds.