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The Wick
Roon is a cacheme, an organic human born of inorganic human extravagance. Her memory erased, she has only one clue to her her name. No longer of use to the people who created her, she wakes up in a glass box in a room full of girls in glass boxes, far away from the people and places that formed her identity, her past.
Bukef is a hull—part-beast, part-war-machine. Hulls are built to bond with soldiers, their wicks, for life. But Bukef and Roon form an immediate attachment, each seeing something in the other that they understand.
During an unexpected attack, Bukef saves Roon, and she becomes an unlikely wick—not a soldier, not built for war. Their bond runs deep. Together, they have to outsmart their vindictive creators and try to find the place that Roon once called home.
Bukef is a hull—part-beast, part-war-machine. Hulls are built to bond with soldiers, their wicks, for life. But Bukef and Roon form an immediate attachment, each seeing something in the other that they understand.
During an unexpected attack, Bukef saves Roon, and she becomes an unlikely wick—not a soldier, not built for war. Their bond runs deep. Together, they have to outsmart their vindictive creators and try to find the place that Roon once called home.
- GenresScience Fiction
100 pages, Paperback
First published January 10, 2023
1 person is currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
Julianna Baggott
40 books1,480 followersCritically acclaimed, bestselling author Julianna Baggott has published more than twenty books under her own name as well as pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode. Her recent novel, Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (2015). Her novel Pure, the first of a trilogy, was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (2012) and won an ALA Alex Award. Her work has been optioned by Fox2000, Nickelodeon/Paramount, and Anonymous Content and she currently has work in development at Netflix with Shawn Levy attached to direct, Paramount with Jessica Biel attached, Disney+, Lionsgate, and Warner Brothers, to name a few. For more on her film and TV work, click here. There are over one hundred foreign editions of Julianna’s novels published or forthcoming overseas. Baggott’s work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Modern Love column, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune, Glamour, Real Simple, Best Creative Nonfiction, Best American Poetry, and has been read on NPR’s Here and Now, Talk of the Nation, and All Things Considered. Her essays, stories, and poems are highly anthologized.
Baggott began publishing short stories when she was twenty-two and sold her first novel while still in her twenties. After receiving her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she published her first novel, the national bestseller Girl Talk. It was quickly followed by The Boston Globe bestseller, The Miss America Family, and then The Boston Herald Book Club selection, The Madam, an historical novel based on the life of her grandmother. She co-wrote Which Brings Me to You with Steve Almond, A Best Book of 2006 (Kirkus Reviews); it has been optioned by Anonymous Content, and currently by BCDF, with a screenplay penned by playwright Keith Bunin.
Her Bridget Asher novels, published by Bantam Dell at Random House, include All of Us and Everything, listed in “Best New Books” in People magazine (2015), The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted, The Pretend Wife, and My Husband’s Sweethearts.
Although the bulk of her work is for adults, she has published award-winning novels for younger readers under the pen name N.E. Bode as well as her own name. Her seven novels for younger readers include, most notably, The Anybodies trilogy, which was a People Magazine summer reading pick alongside David Sedaris and Bill Clinton, a Washington Post Book of the Week, a Girl’s Life Top Ten, a Booksense selection, and was in development at Nickelodeon/Paramount. Other titles include The Slippery Map, The Ever Breath, and the prequel to Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, a movie starring Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman, and Jason Bateman. For two years, Bode was a recurring personality on XM Sirius Radio. Julianna’s Boston Red Sox novel The Prince of Fenway Park (HarperCollins) was on the Sunshine State Young Readers Awards List and The Massachusetts Children’s Book Award for 2011-2012.
Baggott also has an acclaimed career as a poet, having published four collections of poetry – Instructions: Abject & Fuming, This Country of Mothers, Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees, and Lizzie Borden in Love. Her poems have appeared in some of the most venerable literary publications in the country, including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and Best American Poetry (2001, 2011, and 2012).
She is an associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts where she teaches screenwriting. From 2013-2017, she held the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross. In 2006, Baggott and her husband, David Scott, co-founded the nonprofit organization Kids in Need – Books in Deed which focuses on literacy and getting free books into the hands of underprivileged children in the state of Florida. David Scott is also her creative and business partner. They have four children. Her oldest daughte
Baggott began publishing short stories when she was twenty-two and sold her first novel while still in her twenties. After receiving her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she published her first novel, the national bestseller Girl Talk. It was quickly followed by The Boston Globe bestseller, The Miss America Family, and then The Boston Herald Book Club selection, The Madam, an historical novel based on the life of her grandmother. She co-wrote Which Brings Me to You with Steve Almond, A Best Book of 2006 (Kirkus Reviews); it has been optioned by Anonymous Content, and currently by BCDF, with a screenplay penned by playwright Keith Bunin.
Her Bridget Asher novels, published by Bantam Dell at Random House, include All of Us and Everything, listed in “Best New Books” in People magazine (2015), The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted, The Pretend Wife, and My Husband’s Sweethearts.
Although the bulk of her work is for adults, she has published award-winning novels for younger readers under the pen name N.E. Bode as well as her own name. Her seven novels for younger readers include, most notably, The Anybodies trilogy, which was a People Magazine summer reading pick alongside David Sedaris and Bill Clinton, a Washington Post Book of the Week, a Girl’s Life Top Ten, a Booksense selection, and was in development at Nickelodeon/Paramount. Other titles include The Slippery Map, The Ever Breath, and the prequel to Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, a movie starring Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman, and Jason Bateman. For two years, Bode was a recurring personality on XM Sirius Radio. Julianna’s Boston Red Sox novel The Prince of Fenway Park (HarperCollins) was on the Sunshine State Young Readers Awards List and The Massachusetts Children’s Book Award for 2011-2012.
Baggott also has an acclaimed career as a poet, having published four collections of poetry – Instructions: Abject & Fuming, This Country of Mothers, Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees, and Lizzie Borden in Love. Her poems have appeared in some of the most venerable literary publications in the country, including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and Best American Poetry (2001, 2011, and 2012).
She is an associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts where she teaches screenwriting. From 2013-2017, she held the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross. In 2006, Baggott and her husband, David Scott, co-founded the nonprofit organization Kids in Need – Books in Deed which focuses on literacy and getting free books into the hands of underprivileged children in the state of Florida. David Scott is also her creative and business partner. They have four children. Her oldest daughte
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 17, 2023
"The Wick" by Julianna Baggott is a look into the future of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Genetic Engineering that is both engrossing and disturbing. The narrative structure itself tells the reader right away that something unusual is going on here. The story is told from the first person point of view of a being we later come to know as Bukef. Bukef is a genetically engineered AI know as a Hull. Hulls are war machines that envelop and bond with soldiers, known as their Wicks, for life. Bukef's narrative is related in the second person to a young woman named Roan. Roan knows nothing of her past except her name, as her memory has been erased.
The story begins as Roan wakes up in a glass box in a room full of girls in glass boxes on a space elevator. The space elevator is attacked and begins to come apart. Roon, Bukef and many others face certain death. During the attack, Bukef spontaneously saves Roon by taking her inside itself, and she becomes an unlikely wick. With Roon hiding inside of and fueling Bukef with her emotional and mental energies, they escape the wreck of the elevator.
The unlikely pair form an immediate symbiotic attachment; each drawn to something in the other that they understand. Bukef is able to sort through the energies it derives from Roan to recover pieces of Roon’s erased memories. She learns that she is a cacheme, a clone of a person grown as insurance should the original die. She’s being taken from her ravaged world to be repurposed on a space station. She wants to go back to her vaguely remembered home to learn why she has become disposable. The pair work together to evade capture and return Roan to that home.
Baggott's choice of narrative structure brings a unique closeness with it and the reader quickly bonds with this unlikely pair. It is weird as the reader to realize you are identifying with beings who are so wildly different from humans today, and it really makes you think about what it means to be human and if all sentient creatures must share some kind of inherent bond regardless of their physical realities or how they came to be.
The story begins as Roan wakes up in a glass box in a room full of girls in glass boxes on a space elevator. The space elevator is attacked and begins to come apart. Roon, Bukef and many others face certain death. During the attack, Bukef spontaneously saves Roon by taking her inside itself, and she becomes an unlikely wick. With Roon hiding inside of and fueling Bukef with her emotional and mental energies, they escape the wreck of the elevator.
The unlikely pair form an immediate symbiotic attachment; each drawn to something in the other that they understand. Bukef is able to sort through the energies it derives from Roan to recover pieces of Roon’s erased memories. She learns that she is a cacheme, a clone of a person grown as insurance should the original die. She’s being taken from her ravaged world to be repurposed on a space station. She wants to go back to her vaguely remembered home to learn why she has become disposable. The pair work together to evade capture and return Roan to that home.
Baggott's choice of narrative structure brings a unique closeness with it and the reader quickly bonds with this unlikely pair. It is weird as the reader to realize you are identifying with beings who are so wildly different from humans today, and it really makes you think about what it means to be human and if all sentient creatures must share some kind of inherent bond regardless of their physical realities or how they came to be.
May 22, 2023
I can see what the author is going for here, and it's an admirable goal, but the story didn't work for me. Perhaps because she is a poet and I am a non-poetic SF reader.
The 1st-and-2nd-person narrative grated for me, perhaps because it seems odd for action: "You are shaken. I walk closer." It makes me think the next sentences will be "You have entered a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. A hollow voice says 'Plugh' ."
The central idea of a vanity backup is interesting, the consequences a few years later are plausible, and it's plausible that the same society might have Hulls. Although in many such "unforeseen consequences" stories it is highly unlikely they would be unforeseen. Sadly, "foreseen but swept aside for profit" is quite possible.
The climbing-into-the-hull part needs work, even in a novella.
The result of their flight is interesting.
I think I might have liked this in a different presentation.
The 1st-and-2nd-person narrative grated for me, perhaps because it seems odd for action: "You are shaken. I walk closer." It makes me think the next sentences will be "You have entered a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. A hollow voice says 'Plugh' ."
The central idea of a vanity backup is interesting, the consequences a few years later are plausible, and it's plausible that the same society might have Hulls. Although in many such "unforeseen consequences" stories it is highly unlikely they would be unforeseen. Sadly, "foreseen but swept aside for profit" is quite possible.
The climbing-into-the-hull part needs work, even in a novella.
The result of their flight is interesting.
I think I might have liked this in a different presentation.
July 6, 2023
This was one of the more original concepts I've read in a while. Sort of a Titanfall meets Horizon Zero Dawn, but with a lot of motherhood symbolism? Idk, not a great description but it was a truly lovely little novella.
July 21, 2023
This should be a movie! Loved it!
January 23, 2024
A short, tight novella that blends and blurs narrative and poetry, machine and organic, self and other.
How to compare/describe: Never Let Me Go meets Octavia Butler meets Psalm for the Wild-Built
How to compare/describe: Never Let Me Go meets Octavia Butler meets Psalm for the Wild-Built
March 26, 2024
I only finished this book as I thought there was going to be more to the story, with thoughts that it would stop being confusing. I finished it, so that is something.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews