Very Stupid Monkeys: Jeanne DuPrau's City of Ember

The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau

One of my convictions about science fiction is that whether it is optimistic or pessimistic about the future it should have an idea about human beings that is roughly consistent with what we know about the species. I don't have a problem with post-disaster stories that decide we are all going to die if this is because we over reached ourselves, or were short sighted about how to use our planet, or just decided to have a war, but stories that rest on presumed stupidity drive me nuts.

The City of Ember is the only book I have liked so little that I decided not to give it to a charity shop but sent it back to the publishers with a list of my objections. Annoyingly, I can't find the letter any more, so the following is a reconstruction.

Plot: The City of Ember has no sky, no moon, no stars. It seems to be underground, and the people in it refugees from a great war. They are running out of food and of raw materials. The protagonists, Doon and Lina, will have to find the way out.

The things that made me scream:
This is a culture that depends on the abilities of its children to stay alive, yet jobs and training are assigned by lottery.
There is only one route out--the instructions have been written on *one* piece of paper, placed in *one* box, and put into the care of *one* person.
The clock which records the passage of time is an analogue clock which has to be wound up. People have forgotten and no one actually knows how much time has passed--ad the founders never heard of atomic clocks?

Things that just annoyed me:
The city's main crop is potatoes. Okay, so there are no insects, but doesn't it strike anyone else that this is not a good choice?
Objects are used until they fall apart, but there seems to be no recycling even of the make do and mend variety.
When the children find the tunnel, they discover candles and matches. Sadly the gas explosion one might expect never occurs.
We discover that the community was established by elderly people and babies. Given what we know about young people -- especially young men--it's miracle it made it past twenty years.
The idea of deliberately imposing ignorance is also bizarre--how? People know stuff they don't know. They pass it on. Children ask questions. Which moves me to the last point.


The assumptions that moved this book from bad to appalling:
No one in this society learns anything new. The only knowledge is old knowledge and that is being lost. I don't have a problem with the idea of Dark Ages, but no Dark Age has ever been static in this way--humans are basically clever monkeys: they see problems and they seek to solve them. This society is colouring in by numbers--it has no sense of inquiry. It hasn't even developed a mythology for the information that is missing.

I disliked The City of Ember because it's "lesson" seemed to be that humans have no ingenuity. Even the protagonists only escape with "found" knowledge, with the aid of "found" materials. It isn't that the people of Ember aren't curious or ingenious that bothered me, it was that they were depicted as if curiosity and ingenuity were a very rare trait. Any consideration of a favelas or one of the many communities of people who live off trash heaps rubbishes this notion immediately. But perhaps DuPrau peopled Ember with mall rats?