Waste of Space

I thought this was hilarious. I can't wait to talk about it at book club. Honestly, I can see it being a movie.

We've still applied the standard network reality casting percentages: fifty percent male, fifty percent female; sixty percent white, thirty percent ethnic, ten percent undetermined; balanced dispersal of ages from fourteen to eighteen; plus the four Golden Tokens: gay, foreigner, disabled, and orphan.

Gosh, I'm honestly a little bit at a loss on how exactly to review this book.
It tries to be many things at once; a satire on society and reality television, a survival story involving adolescents, a study in excess and greed and disparity between social classes, and then some science-fiction thrown in.

Boilded down, Waste of Space is a teen Big Brother that supposedly takes places in space (spoiler alert: it doesn't actually).

Waste of Space follows Chazz Young, a hotshot producer at a cable network called DV8 that shows trashy but enjoyable reality TV (so something like Bravo essentially), who gets the idea to create a show about sending kids into space and filming it. But he's not actually going to send them into space obviously, just make them and anyone watching the show think that he is. Oh, and he's pretty much doing everything on the fly and just going with the flow. It's all very blasé in the writers room for this show.

He holds auditions in malls across America and manipulates kids into signing contracts. There's very minimal time between developing the show and it being on air. And once it's on air it's a huge, astronomical hit, but of course something is bound to go wrong, and it does, completely.
It's all fast paced, and it's actually fun to read. I enjoyed the introduction to the characters and the absolute mania of development more than the actual show and plot, which took up most of the book naturally.

The book is written as a report, with an intern at DV8 compiling evidence in order to determine what actually happened during the duration of Waste Of Space's development, from the initial idea to the last aired episode. Waste Of Space is styled as a collection of audio and video transcripts, so if that's not your thing then you probably won't enjoy 500+ pages of it.
The story is split into four parts; Part One - Preproduction, Part Two - Production, Part Three - The Last Day, and Part Four - Post-Production. Again in all of these we have interviews, transcripts of live and recorded segments for the aired episodes, and transcripts of the live feeds.

At it's core, this is a story about exploration and exploitation. Everyone is exploited, and everyone learns something new about themselves and those around them. Characters who we think are one thing turn out to be another. It's a game, just like reality shows are. Chazz is toying with the audience, all of the teens are toying with each other, and the scientists are doing a little bit of playing themselves.

There were some surprises, some twists and turns, and this book definitely went places that I wasn't expecting. You go into this expecting the antagonist to be one person but it turns out to be someone completely different. There isn't one singular completely good guy, and no one singular completely good guy. Everyone in this book is flawed, even the slightly two-dimensional and underdeveloped characters.

This is a long book, with too many characters trying to do and be too many different things, but it's definitely a fun ride (pun intended).

The way the book ends is kind of hopeful in a completely terrifying way. The whole concept of this book is utterly terrifying, but the fact that one of the contestants is god knows where after casually walking into a black hole and we don't really see the aftermath of it is worrying.
No way would a show like this be on the air now, no way, but even with the slight fantasy/sci-fi setting, it does raise a lot of relatable issues.

If you want to read a book about a ton of teens being trapped together, then this is for you.
If you are looking for a book about space exploration then this probably isn't it (although some of the teens do genuinely believe they're in space right until the very end).
If you're just looking for a fun read, then this might be it.