{"id":2604,"date":"2018-08-04T15:22:01","date_gmt":"2018-08-04T15:22:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zagonibalazs.com\/?post_type=konyvek&p=2604"},"modified":"2024-10-01T18:27:13","modified_gmt":"2024-10-01T18:27:13","slug":"black-light-series","status":"publish","type":"konyvek","link":"https:\/\/zagonibalazs.com\/en\/books\/black-light-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Light series"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Black Light series: The Sphere \/ Out There
(Fekete f\u00e9ny sorozat: A g\u00f6mb \/ Oda\u00e1t)<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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The reader is quickly sucked into this exciting science fiction tale, while he is watching as Vik discover that the City is not maintaining law and order with its swarms of drones \u201cmerely\u201d out of concern for the wellbeing of its citizens. If Vik does not act fast and does not leap into the mysterious Sphere, he might as well meet the same fate as his friend, who fell victim to one of the drones.\u00a0<\/p>

Bal\u00e1zs Z\u00e1goni\u2019s young adult novel highlights affinities with the world in which we live today (the notion of an uprising led by pensioners in an aging society, for instance, hardly seems idle fiction). However, while it may present a moment of history interwoven with dystopian elements, the story also offers insights into the psychological challenges faced by a young teenager growing into an adult.\u00a0<\/p>

The boy\u2019s mother moved to the City long ago, while he and his father have remained in the colony. The various colonies around the city function according to different rules, and Vik\u2019s life is turned completely upside down with the arrival of the Sphere. The Sphere, which is endowed with metaphysical qualities, sometimes appears in his life, and it turns out to be of immense importance not only to him but to the adults around him. Slowly, the things he has taken for granted as simple reality (his childhood, his parents\u2019 divorce, and so on) get new shades of meaning as he sees them from a different perspective.<\/p>

He gradually comes to lose everything he once believed to be true, and he then begins to reinterpret his past, his present, and perhaps his future with the help of a friendship and a love.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Publisher: M\u00f3ra K\u00f6nyvkiad\u00f3
Pages: 360 \/ 392
Date of launch: 2018 \/ 2019
Text: Bal\u00e1zs Z\u00e1goni
Illustrator: Bea Papp
Age group: 12+<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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EXCERPT (The Sphere)<\/h5>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\u201eDad, is it true that when I was very little, some old people broke into our house and you scuffled with them? And they took everything out of the fridge? And then they slept in the stairwell of the building?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

\u201cDid your mother tell you that?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNo, I sometimes sort of remember it, when I\u2019m half asleep. Is it true, or am I just imagining things?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s true, but I didn\u2019t think you remembered any of it. You hadn\u2019t even turned two at the time.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWho were those people?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cGrandparents.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cMy grandparents?!\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNo, the city grandparents. The grandies. That\u2019s what we called them.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI don\u2019t get it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019m not surprised,\u201d he says, stretching a bit. Then he yawns real big and dives into the story. \u201cThat was just after the second pensioners\u2019 uprising.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

\u201cThe second?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYes. The first uprising was relatively mild. They just held protests or sat down on the pavement at the busiest intersections in the city and brought traffic to a halt.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAnd then the police came and sent them on their way?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNot quite. It was slower than that, and more painful. First, the city introduced the \u2018Adopt Two Grandies\u2019 program. They said you could only use some of the basic municipal services if you adopted a pair of grandparents, or grandies. The grandies didn\u2019t know who had adopted them. The whole thing was anonymous. But if you wanted your kids to be able to go to the doctor or the hospital and just to school, then you had to adopt an average of three grandies. By which I mean make regular payments on their behalf. That\u2019s when things started going wrong.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cBut why did they try to pass them off on you?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cCause first the state passed them off on the big cities. That\u2019s when the city-states started to form. The state needed more local taxes to be able to cover the cost of the pensioners. It wasn\u2019t so much the pension payments as it was the cost of care. Think about it: more and more peoples started to live to be ninety or even one-hundred or older. The people of the city didn\u2019t want to pay more taxes, of course, and so the state stopped providing for the pensioners. Then the big cities didn\u2019t want to pay any taxes at all as part of the state budget, since they had to take care of the pensioners. So the state stopped providing other services too. Health care, the courts, the police, the prisons, everything. And then the big cities became completely independent. The villages and the smaller towns quickly allied themselves with whatever city they could, whatever city was closest. Course, that didn\u2019t bring the cities more money. On the contrary!<\/p>

And then they introduced the grandie program.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI still don\u2019t get it. Why didn\u2019t they just tell everyone to provide care for their own parents? Wouldn\u2019t that have been simpler?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYes, it would have. Which is precisely why they didn\u2019t do it. The city leaders quickly realized that the parents and their children would join forces, and the city leaders would face their wrath. And they didn\u2019t want this. So they devised a solution that they could use to rile parents up against children and children up against parents. The messages started to come in. \u2018You will be unable to purchase your medications today because your adoptive son is not providing care for you.\u2019 And messages to the caregivers too: \u2018Today, your grandie is going to bed hungry because you are not providing adequate care.\u2019 The messages were sent by the Pensioners\u2019 Foundation. It worked for a while, but in the end, when your wages aren\u2019t really enough for you to provide for your own children and you are already going into debt, and then you also have your actual parents for whom you are trying to provide care, since their adoptive children can\u2019t, well, after a while no one really concerned themselves with the messages from the Pensioners\u2019 Foundation.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cBut if the whole system was anonymous, then how\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cIt was only anonymous for a time. One year before we were going to emigrate, just before Christmas a group of hacker pensioners allegedly busted into the system and released all the names. But if you ask me, it was the City. Then chaos broke loose. The grandies got their hands on the addresses, and they started knocking on doors, and that\u2019s putting it mildly. That\u2019s what you saw when you were two years old.\u00a0<\/p>

\u201cAnd what became of my real grandmothers and grandfathers?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

\u201cThey were still alive at the time. My parents still grew things in the garden too. They had a little plot of land, but everything they grew on it was stolen. And food wasn\u2019t the only problem. They got more and more frail, and then the contagions started to hit and all the sicknesses and ailments that come with age. It\u2019s a terrible feeling, knowing that there are medicines and treatments which would save them, but you can\u2019t get them. And no one wanted to help the elderly. With every passing day, more and more people started to think, \u2018they\u2019ve lived long enough, now it\u2019s my turn! Let them die!\u2019\u201d<\/p>

I can tell that if I ask another question, he\u2019ll burst into tears.\u00a0<\/p>

\u201cAnd the City just sat back and watched?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

\u201cWho is the City?\u201d he asks in voice so quick and sudden that it startles me. \u201cThe leaders? I think there was only one thing that concerned them: not getting swept away by a wave of public anger. Holding on to power. And the rest of us? We just tried to survive. It was astonishing. One year, you could still get pretty much everything, though the weather was already catastrophic and everything you needed oil for was already expensive. But we still imported things from all over. We could afford it, if just barely. But one year later, everything doubled and tripled and quadrupled in cost. And what did people do? Buy less? No way! They bought more and more and more, even if they didn\u2019t have any money. They sold anything they could, everything they could just to sure they had food in the fridge and on the shelves. And that made everything even more expensive.\u201d<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"featured_media":2327,"menu_order":2,"template":"","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"konyvkategoria":[64],"class_list":{"0":"post-2604","1":"konyvek","2":"type-konyvek","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"konyvkategoria-young-adult"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zagonibalazs.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/konyvek\/2604"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zagonibalazs.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/konyvek"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zagonibalazs.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/konyvek"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/zagonibalazs.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/konyvek\/2604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2812,"href":"https:\/\/zagonibalazs.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/konyvek\/2604\/revisions\/2812"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zagonibalazs.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zagonibalazs.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"konyvkategoria","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zagonibalazs.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/konyvkategoria?post=2604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}