Warning: spoilers ahead for season 1 of Star Trek: Discovery, and for the season 2 premiere episode, “Brother.”

When Star Trek: Discovery returned for its second season last week, it came with an insurance plan and a risk.

First, the premiere episode, “Brother,” welcomed Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), the captain who helmed the original series’ USS Enterprise in its rejected initial 1965 pilot, before Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was asked to create a new pilot with the now-iconic James T. Kirk in the chair. Whatever grumblings Trekkies may have had about the bald fan-service decision to bring Pike and his first officer, the also-iconic Vulcan Spock, into the picture at the end of season 1, it was an inevitability. As the first new Trek series in over a decade, Discovery grounded itself in prequel territory from the get-go by revealing that its star, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), was Spock’s adopted human sister. The move was meant, for better or worse, to put doubtful fans a bit more at ease by situating the series adjacent to a familiar canon.

But like the series’ controversial first season, the new episode also featured a pretty direct left turn. Bucking the time-honored Trek trope of selecting a “redshirt” (a low-ranking, generic officer) to be the sole casualty of the first Starfleet away mission of the season, Discovery instead chose to off a smug, insecure white male science officer — mid-mansplain.

The move was heavy-handed. It’s made clear from the moment he appears on the transformer pad that this Lieutenant Connolly, barging into the story where fans expected Spock, is kind of a douchebag — more Winklevoss than Vulcan. At every opportunity, he negs Burnham’s suggestions and hypotheses about the mysterious red signals that have appeared across the galaxy. Then, when the team deploys in a set of explorer pods to navigate an unpredictable asteroid cluster, he presumes he knows the vehicles better than her, even though she was the original test pilot for the pods. When she warns him about the way he’s navigating, he starts loudly telling her why she’s wrong — and in the middle of his explanation, a rogue asteroid runs sidelong into his pod, killing him instantly.

Given that we barely heard a word from the mission’s female redshirt — a dead giveaway, in previous Treks, that a character is disposable and likely to be a goner — killing off Connolly is a starkly political choice. Discovery’s creators have been making decisions like this from the show’s conceptualization. First, they steered away from the classic male-commander protagonist, by centering their show around a black female first officer who was court-martialed and stripped of her rank for treason. Second, they introduced the first gay couple in Trek history (Anthony Rapp as Lt. Paul Stamets and Wilson Cruz as Dr. Hugh Culber). Third, they framed the series’ only prominent straight white male (Jason Isaacs as Captain Gabriel Lorca) as a secret fascist, human supremacist villain.

And on top of everything else, the show frequently tosses in tiny, pointed nods to progressive politics. A subplot involving a resource-consuming technology prompts Burnham to deliver a mini lecture about conservation. An encounter with a xenophobic culture inspires some head shaking about the shortsightedness and weakness of homogeneity, and people who fear anyone who doesn’t look like them. From its opening episodes, Star Trek: Discovery has been actively thumbing its nose at every social-media-bombing, Jordan Peterson-following crybaby whining about “PC culture” and “the war on masculinity,” along with every talk show host bemoaning the aggressive push for diversity in pop culture.

But for any Trekkie worth their salt, this stance ought to come as no surprise, since openly progressive politics is a natural extension of what Star Trek has literally existed to do from its 1960s inception. This cultural and political stance has been baked into the show since its opening lines: “boldly going where no [one] has gone before” is in the franchise’s DNA. The whole point of Star Trek is — to quote Pike in the Discovery premiere — to “make a little noise, ruffle a few feathers,” to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, by portraying a future in which so much of the oppression and injustice regularly committed in the current era was solved long ago. Whining about Discovery’s obvious stunting, or suggesting that it’s too performatively “woke,” is forgetting the show’s history and its longtime intentions.

Part of the inevitable backlash from this dark corner of Trek fandom, of course, is generational. Many of today’s Trekkies watched the original series (TOS) long after its initial run, and watched the series of the 1980s and 1990s — The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine — when they were decades younger, and thus likely more open-minded than they might be today. Those experiences likely cemented these fans’ ideas of what progressivism on television should look like: at the time, it still centered on straight, white, cisgendered men.

While Voyager featured a white woman as captain (Kate Mulgrew as Kathryn Janeway), and DS9 a black man (Avery Brooks as Benjamin Sisko), TOS and TNG (and the much later Enterprise) all featured heterosexual white men in the starring slots. Star Trek progressivism was instead often expressed in ways that were at the vanguard of popular sentiment, but not so far beyond it as to completely alienate conservative viewers — Ronald Reagan, for example, was reportedly a Next Generation fan. (Although let’s be real, he probably never saw “The Outcast.”) While Gene Roddenberry was alive, he famously had to fight Paramount and the networks for his more radical ideas, and he frequently lost those battles — for instance, when he tried to give the Enterprise a female first officer in 1966, or portray openly gay relationships in the 1980s. There were always limits to what Trek was allowed to do. The progressive, futurist elements that did get through defined these series for many of the fans who loved the shows — but for straight cis white men, a fundamental part of the story was their assured place at the forefront of the progress the shows were making.

In this era, putting a black woman in that slot — and staffing Discovery’s bridge crew with mostly female officers — needed to be a given from day one. Fans of color, particularly women, have been increasingly vocal about their limited representation on-screen over the past decade, and not acknowledging that lack in a new Star Trek show would have been the series’ first obvious mistake, at least if the showrunners wanted to continue the franchise’s traditional push toward a more inclusive, equitable future.

But the second-season premiere’s blunt deconstruction of toxic white male masculinity is a much bigger step, and it could be a defining point for the show. Where Treks past have modeled forceful but progressive expressions of masculinity in characters like Captain Picard or Captain Sisko, none have really interrogated the cost of condescension and entitlement like Discovery does with Connolly’s abruptly karmic demise. Explorations of topics like this have always been relegated to gentler metaphor, through alien cultures like the Klingons’ obsession with honor, or the Cardassians’ imperialist fascism. But in 2019, when centuries of whiteness and maleness are being disrupted more publicly than ever before, Discovery addressing it head-on puts the franchise, as a whole, right where it needs to be.

And it bears repeating, for the thousandth time: where Star Trek tends to go, so too does society. We all have hand-held communication devices and touchscreens now, but society has progressed so far toward the ideals of the original 1966 Trek that what used to feel progressive and even overreaching now feels quaint and of its era. Mae Jemison, the first black American woman in space, was specifically inspired to become an astronaut by Nichelle Nichols’ presence on the first Enterprise’s bridge, but her first flight was more than a quarter-century ago. There’s still plenty of progress left to be made in practically every arena of representation and equality. But what American society has accomplished so far looks a lot like the Treks’ integrated, diversity-welcoming futures.

Star Trek has never been written for conservative snowflakes. It succeeds because it’s made for those who need its vision to keep boldly going forward, to be heartened and find the strength to continue pushing for the kind of better future Trek imagines. As Eugene Roddenberry, Roddenberry’s son and an executive producer on Discovery, put it to me in 2013: “[Star Trek’s inclusivity] is the only thing that [has] kept it alive. The whole geek / nerd / dork fan movement was a bunch of people who look at life differently. They’re the ones who are leading the charge today, not just with Star Trek, but also, frankly, the world.”

When the trailers for DC’s Aquaman started rolling out earlier this year, they promised a lot of wild delights. There were angry aquarium sharks; a bioluminescent Atlantis, equal parts Gungan city and Avatar planet; an underwater reenactment of the Thor-vs.-Hulk gladiator showdown in Thor: Ragnarok; and Patrick Wilson’s deeply upsetting hair. At the top of that list, of course: a perpetually shirtless, perpetually wet Jason Momoa. In fact, the promise of a DC film knowingly indulging the female gaze — and in an over-the-top abundance worthy of some of the best-worst movies of the past decade — was such a strong implication in those early promos that it inspired a very good meme.

The finished film certainly puts Shirtless Momoa™ on the table. All the beats previewed in the trailers do, in fact, turn up in the film itself. By all accounts, as Polygon’s Karen Han put it, “this movie has everything.” Yet that checklist is, more or less, all Aquaman amounts to: a two-hour, 23-minute extended cut of the trailer — smirky one-liners, Lisa Frank-worthy underwater cities, and all.

But that alone isn’t enough to save this, the wettest DC movie to date, from falling short of what it could have been. Aquaman isn’t disappointing because it’s predictable, or because it’s awful. What fool among us expects true cinematic greatness of a DC film at this point? Aquaman is disappointing because it isn’t awful enough.

This movie — which seemed as though it might finally bring DC Entertainment into full, self-aware bloom as the superhero-movie factory that thrives not in high-end prestige storytelling, but in the chaos of decadent insanity — deserved to be far more deranged than it is. Maybe writers David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Will Beall tried too hard to rationalize the material, updating one of DC’s weirder, quainter heroes into something modern. Maybe director James Wan actually takes his work seriously, and doesn’t have enough screws loose to fully throw artistic caution to the wind.

Whatever the case, Aquaman falls into an uncomfortable try-hard dead zone that leaves it in better shape than, say, Batman v. Superman or Suicide Squad, but just shy of the gleefully anarchic predecessors whose ranks it could have joined, like Jupiter Ascending or Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

Some spoilers for Aquaman follow, but again, most of this is also in the trailers.

The plot is, again, exactly what the previews promise, and nothing more: Arthur Curry (Momoa) is the illicit lovechild of Maine lighthouse-keeper Thomas Curry (Temuera Morrison) and the washed-ashore Atlantian Queen Atlanna (Nicole Kidman). He has no interest in Atlantis, until his younger brother, Atlantean King Orm (Wilson), decides to consolidate the kingdoms and powers of the sea to become “Ocean Master,” so he can wage war on the “surface-dwellers” who are polluting the oceans. To save humanity, Arthur must return to Atlantis — with the aid of Orm’s betrothed, the stubborn Princess Mera (Amber Heard) — to find a legendary trident, defeat his brother with it, and claim his rightful place as King. It’s Camelot, it’s The Lion King, it’s a goddamn patriarchal monarchy where a couple of utterly poreless white women in phenomenally bad wigs get a fight scene or two.

There are a fair number of extra plot tidbits along the way — 143 minutes is quite the space to fill. After Atlanna returned to Atlantis to protect the secret of their family, Arthur is told, she was executed for attempting to escape her arranged marriage to the king. In her stead, royal advisor Vulko (Willem Dafoe) — in his inexplicably ample free time away from his duties to King Orm — visits Arthur on the surface, teaching him to fight and swim in the ways of his people. The teacher-turned-fascist from The 100 (Michael Beach) is the embittered father of B-plot villain Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a capable underwater pirate whose vendetta against Aquaman leads to a ludicrously expensive-looking yet admittedly impressive extended chase-and-fight scene in an Italian seaside town. On top of that, there are dinosaurs in the core of the earth, in a reveal taken so utterly for granted that not a single character comments on it.

It’s clear that fans are just supposed to relish the rococo decadence of all of this, from the massive neon underwater world to the vast armies of CGI riding-fish. There’s a level of self-awareness in Aquaman’s more grandiose images and plot movements that’s certainly been missing from previous DC movies. The story is so deliberately corny that it’s never really moving, no matter how much it reaches in the direction of emotion.

But too many aspects of the story hold together in deceptively irrational ways, which fits poorly with a film about a tattooed man-fish looking for a magic fork. Orm sounds perfectly reasonable when he’s plotting his revenge on the toxic, imperialist humans, but he’s also a megalomaniac who really wants people to call him Ocean Master. A compelling villain with a sympathetic platform is better than gold in these times, and much harder to find, even in Marvel’s house of hits. Orm’s apparent sincerity, and his serious point about the surface-dwellers, feels out of step with the rest of his deal. A movie framed like Aquaman calls for a Balem Abrasax, not an Erik Killmonger.

Other potential entry points for bananapants antics are left unexamined. Aquaman features an entire subspecies of actual fish people, for example. They seem to be the pacifist philosophers of the sea, but they exist solely so they can be conquered in a 60-second scene. There’s a crustacean nation whose battle scene evokes the dwarves of Middle-earth facing the endless monsters of Mordor in Lord of the Rings, yet the film only doles out a few brief lines from their leader. The audience is rushed into and out of entire new kingdoms and species of underwater sentients as though the camera operator showed up late to work and was trying to make up for lost time. Every cuts feels like a resentful compromise with the studio — the 143-minute run time drags, while still not feeling like nearly enough time to cover this much ground.

And while Mera seems entirely capable herself, with her water-manipulation powers (also never commented on by anyone in the film) and wild combat skills, she still does an astonishing amount of legwork in an effort to install a hostile, self-described dummy as her people’s leader. (Because One True King, Chosen One, traditional fish-monarchy something something.) Meanwhile, there isn’t enough shirtless-Momoa screen time. After a wave of advertising focused primarily on his chest, its actual presence in the film feels minimal, to a degree that borders on fraudulent.

Garbage cannot be delectable garbage if viewers feel in control while watching it. Jupiter Ascending, for example, requires that the audience give up any notion of predictability or reason within the first 10 minutes. And filmmakers cannot give the world a Troll 2 if they’re actively seeking to make Troll 2. Aquaman’s stunt CG, and laugh-out-loud clunky lines like “Where I come from, the sea carries away our tears” are not enough to qualify a film for the Exquisite Trash Hall of Fame.

That all said, Aquaman is nevertheless a step in the right direction for Warner Bros. and the DC Universe. It’s perhaps unreasonable to expect a studio that has spent a decade investing in dark, brooding self-seriousness to flip its script with one film, no matter how many Baja hoodies, Rainbow sandals, and literal krakens they throw at it. It’s clear the company is finally starting to get the joke, though, and to loosen up. “That was the worst pep talk. Ever.” is about as far as the humor goes in Aquaman, but what humor it does summon is still a relief after so many sour, dour DC movies. Get Taika Waititi and the Wachowskis to consult on the inevitable sequel’s script, and DC will be well on its way to fully realizing its true legacy.

The second half of 2018 was an eventful few months for animation. This summer, Cartoon Network and HowStuffWorks released Drawn, a miniseries dedicated to cartoon history; meanwhile, as expected, The Incredibles 2 broke records at the box office. Fall yielded Netflix’s The Dragon Prince, a new series from the head writer of the beloved Avatar: The Last Airbender, as well as news that the head writer of Rick and Morty would be developing a new Star Trek animated series in conjunction with Discovery producer Alex Kurtzman’s five-year CBS deal. Major projects like Noelle Stevenson’s She-Ra: Princess of Power reboot for Netflix and Disney’s internet-inspired Wreck-It Ralph sequel rounded out the year.

But even with all this going on, the excitement over Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse seemed to rule 2018 in animation. Buzz about this first-ever feature-length animated Spidey film was fevered from the moment its first trailer hit in June; the art style felt fresh and thrilling in a way no animated movie had in years. And the movie didn’t disappoint: currently sitting at a solid 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s a critical success as well as a box-office hit. Maybe that was predictable, since the film was produced by The Lego Movie favorites Phil Lord and Chris Miller, but audiences have raved about the film’s unique aesthetics just as much as the story itself. The film’s eclectic, ambitious, constantly shifting visuals — which range from deliberately cartoony to abstract and psychedelic — are likely to help inspire a new wave of animators to start pushing past the Pixar Animation house style that so many animation studios are now rigorously emulating.

Back in July, at San Diego Comic-Con, The Verge spoke with Into the Spider-Verse’s three directors — Bob Persichetti (Puss in Boots, The Little Prince), Peter Ramsey (A Wrinkle in Time, The Rise of the Guardians), and Rodney Rothman (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) — about what it took to deliver the film’s iconic look, a blend of hand-drawn and digital animation techniques that birthed a whole new kind of cartoon.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

There’s been a bit of shifting in terms of who’s credited for what on the project. How did you all join the film?

Bob Persichetti: I came on in December 2015, through a separate project that I was working on at Sony. Then Kristine Belson, the head of Sony Pictures Animations, said, “Hey, we have this other thing we’d like you to read, you might be right for it… Do you like Spider-Man?”

And who says, “Nah, not really a fan”?

BP: Right? It’s a trick question. Then she said, “Do you like Phil Lord and Chris Miller?” I was like, “Oh, okay. Very Interesting.” I read a 40-page treatment, and ended up saying I’d love to be a part of it. When the movie comes out December 14th, I will have been working on this project three years almost to the day.

Peter Ramsey: I was actually working on another project with Into the Spider-Verse producer Avi Arad and got drawn into Spider-Man not too long after Bob, because of the scope of the project and then the schedule, which was pretty tight. The producers were kind of feeling like, “Okay, let’s make sure we have enough horses pulling the wagon to get this thing done in time.”

Rodney Rothman: Peter and I have worked together in the past.

PR: Actually quite a bit, so it was kind of a natural fit.

RR: I had started on the movie and worked with these guys initially as a writer. Around the time when production was really ramping up, I came in to direct. We all basically worked on everything a little bit, but I focused a lot on script and some of the front-end stuff: records, editing. We all kind of bounced off each other basically.

There are a lot of Spider-Man movies, both in the past and coming down the pipeline, and this is the big-screen debut for Miles Morales. How did you approach characterizing him in animation?

BP: In the moment when you’re asked, “Hey, how do you feel about Spider-Man?” You go, “Yeah, I love Spider-Man, but do we really need another Spider-Man movie?” That was the first reaction, and then you go, “Oh! Miles Morales? Okay, cool.” As you start to peel back the layers of this film, that’s what really hooks me — a different take on an origin story for Spider-Man.

We’ve seen it over and over, and that presented a really fantastic creative challenge. Everyone thinks they know the way Spider-Man was created. We have the same ingredients, but it’s through Miles’ point of view. He has a family — a mother and father, which is as rare as you can get in this world. He’s from Brooklyn. It felt natural to roll the idea of Miles Morales into Brooklyn, given the creation of the comics in New York. We feed all those things into this movie and it just felt like an expanding, natural, rhyming universe. For me, it was a blast.

Miles stands out as the first non-white Spider-Man, but how did you approach making him distinctive among all the other spider-people in this movie?

RR: A lot of it starts with the comic books, all of us reading them, reacting to them, trying to figure out what makes this person different and specific. A lot of it comes from building this world around him, visually and in terms of how it feels unique and different. We put a lot of energy into creating a world and experience for the audience that isn’t like other things they’ve seen, that has its own DNA and fingerprint.

What did you bring to the project that wasn’t in the comics?

PR: I guess it’s probably putting a finer point on the story to tell it in the time we have. We had to engineer certain things to have more focus or impact than the comics. They’re spooling out a continuing story. We have to boil down the essence of the journey Miles is taking. For me, it comes down to, what’s his version of “With great power comes great responsibility”? What does that mean to this 13-year-old kid growing up in Brooklyn, and his circumstance in the year 2018, that’s different from what is was for Peter Parker back in 1960-whatever?

Also, like what Bob was saying, this kid has a mom and dad, and they have attitudes about Spider-Man, because it’s a universe that already has Spider-Man. All those elements take cues from the comics. In the script, Phil was basically like, “Boil it down to the essentials. From there, construct whatever new pieces we needed for the movie. The themes in the comics, how do we express those in our two-hour movie?”

RR: It’s about Miles, the family around him, what they’re like, the city that’s around him, what that’s like. When we boil it down, it emanates from that.

How did you develop your visual style?

PR: [Deadpan] There’s this guy in Van Nuys who does it all. We don’t even know what he’s doing.

BP: [More deadpan] We send him the script and we just keep getting this stuff.

PR: We subscribe to a cool animation magazine, and this guy had an ad in the back!

BP: A 15-year-old.

RR: [Also deadpan] It’s being made out of a garage.

It feels like a mash-up of different kinds of animation. It’s got the illustrative style of comic books. It’s got a Pixar or DreamWorks feel in the character design. It’s also a little psychedelic. How did you land on that combination?

BP: In the same vein of “Why make another Spider-Man?,” it was, “Well this is part of that.” We have the cachet of making a Spider-Man movie, and that let us be more adventurous with the style of the filmmaking. With the power of the franchise behind us, it became, “Let’s try to create something that feels uniquely Spider-Man and Miles Morales-specific.”

We looked at how comic books are made, going all the way back to silk-screening and printing-press ideas. Then we took the current CG animation pipeline and said, “Okay, how do we make something that looks like this and feels like this, but is still cinematic and large and produceable?”

Because that’s the thing: you can do it on a super-small scale, but how do you make a whole movie look like that? That was really the biggest challenge, was just trying to come up with this really cool visual style and animation style and procedurally scale it up: “How do we deal with all the things that have been created in CG animation over the last 20 years?” All these algorithms do all this stuff naturally. They all depend on certain things. We took a lot of those certain things out. We had to have the people write new code and come up with new theories on how to make cloth move, all this in-the-weeds stuff that always prevented a new style. The existing algorithms took a really long time to develop, so nobody in animation had the ability to then say, “We’re not going to use that stuff you spent all that time and money developing.” We got lucky. We got that privilege, basically. We got to keep pushing, and we discovered something that ended up working.

Can you give an example of what you’re talking about — those things you had to patch or remake?

BP: For example, all our animation is on twos. In standard film, you shoot 24 frames per second. In old traditional hand-drawn animation, you would draw 12 drawings per second. Every other frame was repeated to give a certain crispness to the movement. If you wanted something to feel smoother, you’d put it on ones. The existing computer-animation process reads everything on ones. All the simulations, from hair to cloth to you name it, all those algorithms require an image on every single frame. What seems like it would be incredibly simple — “Let’s just drop every other frame out and animate this one on twos” — blows up the whole pipeline.

At a base level, we animated the whole movie on twos, which makes it feel crisper and almost crunchy, and really sharp. That was an attempt to get to a place that felt like comic-book panels, where you really have impact with an image, and it burns into your psyche. You’re like, “Wow, that’s the most powerful version of that image I could get.”

We’re trying to chase that, so we started stripping, animating on twos. A lot of these young animators never have done that, because it was passé. They’d only worked on computers, and they don’t know how it used to work. I was lucky enough to come into this industry right on the cusp of CG. Just that thing alone required months and months and months and months and months to figure out. “Okay, so we can animate on twos, but how do we finish it? How do we do everything else?” I got to meet all these wonderful people who wrote code that saved the movie.

RR: And who are pumped to be trying something different. Once you solve all these crazy problems, then the next puzzle comes: “Well, how do we use all these cool new tools that were developed to express the story and emotion in a way that is more evocative than if we had just done it a normal way?” Once they build the playground—

You have to create the language on top of that.

RR: It really becomes, “How do we now tell our story in a way that only we can, using these cool new things?”

BP: I think that was the biggest revelatory moment for us, when we went from our first teaser, which was mostly cityscapes and Miles, all this really cool-looking stuff. That was a lot of “Let’s paint this impressionistic version of New York and Spider-Man.” Then when we released our actual trailer, you saw a lot of good characters, these incredible emotional relationships developing. That was proof of the style not overwhelming the content. That was always the fine line we were trying to walk.

Trying to maintain equal parts style and substance?

PR: That was a huge challenge as we were developing the look. For the longest time, we would go, “Okay, what does just a normal character having a conversation in daytime look like?” For a long time, we didn’t have an answer for something that basic in this new style we were pushing. When we finally got to a place where you were looking at something that you thought the style was really cool, but you were able to look past it and get straight to the performance and the emotion, that was the hallelujah moment: “Oh, it’s actually going to work!”

Action movies in general have gotten so much quicker in terms of how action sequences are staged, what audiences are expected to keep up with. How do you pace a movie like this?

BP: There were moments where we leaned into that, where speed and pace is part of the propulsion of the movie. At other times, we sit back and slow down and let you enjoy character moments. We have a lot of that. There are just a lot of, hopefully, engaging moments, relationship-building moments. Also, it’s a Marvel movie, it’s a Spider-Man movie, it’s an action film. We want to break new ground on that as well. We can’t do it at the cost of engagement with the characters. It’s a fine balance.

But you’re still working within the pacing of the larger superhero-movie canon.

BP: I’d say very much so. If anything, we’re just trying to embrace what the tools can give us to push how exciting and dynamic can it get. How much can we exaggerate action or visuals or color—

PR: —that no live-action Marvel movie could ever do.

RR: One nice thing about telling this story with animation is that there isn’t a point of disbelief for the audience.

So you can really do whatever with your characters?

BP: Yeah, but it also goes the other way.

RR: In the first couple of minutes of the movie, people are adjusting to a look and feel and a palette. We can’t lose them with effects. It’s all an integrated world. But you can do a lot in that world, and that’s part of what was exciting. The flip side — I think we do operate in some ways like the movies are talking about. In other ways, part of the fun challenge was seeing if we just do a scene between two characters, slow down for a few minutes, and let the characters communicate to us, what does that feel like in this new world that we’re creating? We’ve been really psyched and encouraged by the way it feels and looks.

Young adult science fiction can be hit or miss. Each genre tag is a challenge by itself; with science fiction, unless you’re already a scientist, you have to be able to speak the technical language to be taken seriously. With YA, the task is the same, just inverted — if your characters are young, you must inhabit the headspace of a teenager without coming off as an Tryhard Old™. YA sci-fi, then, is akin to walking a razor’s edge authority-wise: be brilliant and naïve simultaneously, or risk losing your audience from the jump.

Portland-based author Emily Suvada walks this line better than any YA author I’ve read with her in-progress trilogy, the second book of which, This Cruel Design, was published last month. Along with its predecessor, This Mortal Coil, the series rivals The Hunger Games for its whirlwind life-or-death drama, while giving the carefully crafted science of Orphan Black a run for its money. The instant I finished This Mortal Coil last summer — usually an abominably slow reader, I devoured each of these over a weekend — I wanted to get it into the hands of every teenager I know. (Full disclosure: Suvada and I share a literary agent, but we’ve never met.)

Some spoilers follow for This Mortal Coil (but not This Cruel Design).

The books take place in a future America where gene-hacking is a consumer technology. Almost everyone on earth is implanted at birth with a biotech “panel,” which grows in a person’s body and hosts code and apps that can do everything from curing chronic illness to changing one’s physical appearance and abilities. (These apps don’t fundamentally change a person’s DNA, but rather wrap around and mask it — usually.)

One mega-corporation, Cartaxus, sells and distributes proprietary gene-hacking apps, while plenty of ordinary citizens around the world code their own “non-standard” apps to upgrade themselves how they see fit. People have a whole variety of ideas about the ethical limitations of gene-hacking — with fringier communities pushing the boundaries of the human form in radical ways, giving themselves animal attributes like scales or sharpened teeth — but the majority of people stick to standard cosmetic and medical upgrades. 

When the story begins, a curiously horrific pandemic is fast overtaking the world, a virus that has thus far been resistant to vaccine attempts, and seemingly as a result of biotech meddling: it attacks the host’s DNA until every cell in the person’s body explodes in a plume of red mist. If that wasn’t bad enough, the only way to temporarily protect oneself against infection is to eat the flesh of an infected person; the scent of the infected inspires an instinctual, cannibalistic bloodlust in the uninfected known as “The Wrath” that compels them toward the unspeakable inoculation.

Cartaxus has herded roughly a billion people around the world into the corporation’s massive underground bunkers, where they are ostensibly protected from the virus — the catch is, only Cartaxus-approved tech is allowed inside, so to be welcomed into a bunker, one must wipe all non-standard apps from one’s panel. This poses a problem for countless millions with hacker-designed apps that treat or cure rare diseases and conditions, apps that Cartaxus has not deemed worthwhile to design and release itself.

18-year-old Catarina Agatta is one of these. As the daughter of Dr. Lachlan Agatta, one of the world’s most brilliant gene-hackers, Catarina has been told she has hypergenesis, an extremely rare autoimmune condition that acts like an allergy and keeps her from hacking her own panel, despite being an incredibly skilled hacker in her own right. Her father — who for decades worked for Cartaxus developing its biotech, including the panels themselves — has customized her panel himself over the years; it contains simple medical code but otherwise is incredibly limited, and because of her disease, all of it is non-standard.

Lachlan has holed the two up, along with his research assistant Dax, in a remote North Dakota cabin to escape the grasp of Cartaxus, which wants to re-recruit him against his will to develop a proprietary vaccine and which would force Cat to wipe her panel to join him, a fate Lachlan says would kill her. Instead, the trio spend their days working on an open-source vaccine themselves, one that would be available to everyone — rather than solely bunker inhabitants, as a Cartaxus vaccine would be distributed — through a “rebellion” network of free-thinking hackers called the Skies, which regularly hacks Cartaxus bunkers to bring life-saving code to those on the surface.

Of course, Cartaxus finds them after a few years; it captures both Lachlan and Dax and spirits them away to one of their bunkers, leaving Cat on her own in the wilderness, waiting for the virus to reach her. Before it does, however, a Cartaxus black-out agent rolls up. A young soldier who relinquishes his or her panel to the corporation to be filled to the brim with deadly and powerful abilities and reflexes that trigger instinctively and on the company’s commands, Cole has been secretly dispatched by her father to help her obtain what she needs to crack the vaccine. But he also ends up having been a subject of Lachlan’s Cartaxus experiments when he was a child, the first of countless revelations that end up calling into question Catarina’s whole life — including her very identity.

The story that unravels from there is one that, in the hands of a lesser writer, could have been drowned in a deluge of exposition. Written in first person present, Catarina’s young yet brilliant stream of consciousness belies Suvada’s own studies in math and astrophysics. Cat is advanced enough to expound on genetic concepts and save lives in medical emergencies, but naïve enough to take her relationships and her past at face value, only to be torn asunder by the countless revelations that unfold (and will no doubt continue to in the third book, which, at the current rate, is likely to be published next year).

Meanwhile, deeply troubling themes around bioethics and technological innovation permeate every corner with admirable attention to detail, from questions of bodily autonomy and consent in genetic research (including some serious implications of medical racism!) to Frankenstein-esque questions about how far scientists and corporations should really allow their ambitions to take them. It’s easy to see traces of today’s tech moguls in these stories’ villains, particularly in their megalomaniacal pursuit of “bettering humanity,” even if it means superseding humanity’s choice in the matter at any cost.

The best genre stories are ones that challenge you, that believe you are smart and capable of keeping up with them. This Mortal Coil and This Cruel Design deliver this in a way that few YA series do; they expect more of young readers than almost anything I read as a tween, but do so in a way that’s accessible and satisfying. (The one thirteen-year-old I did actually buy the first book for has already read it at least three times and lent it to a friend — hi, Stella!) Suvada herself has expounded on her own process on Twitter, in particular a technique she describes as peaks, promises, and bombshells that make the books move at a breakneck pace; sometimes that pacing can be exhausting — everything happens so much — but isn’t that exactly what life feels like these days?