VARIANT, by Robison Wells
Benson Fisher thought that a scholarship to Maxfield Academy would be the ticket out of his dead-end life.
He was wrong.
Now he's trapped in a school that's surrounded by a razor-wire fence, where video cameras monitor his every move—and where breaking the rules equals death.
All Benson wants is to find a way out. But when he stumbles upon the real secret the school has been hiding, he realizes that escape may be impossible.
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Variant Trivia:
I've written a lot about how Variant came to being, and you can get the whole story in my About Me page, but the basic gist of it was this:
I was unemployed and my brother, Dan Wells, author of the I Am Not a Serial Killer books, offered to pay my way to the World Fantasy Convention and introduce me to all the agents and editors he knew--the only problem was that I needed a book that was either science fiction or fantasy AND I needed a manuscript finished in two months. So I dove in, and churned out the first draft of Variant in eleven days.
It didn't get any traction from anyone at the convention, but I snagged an agent (my brother's agent, actually) a week later, and the book sold to HarperTeen about six months after that, after three rounds of submissions. It sold in a three book deal, which covered Variant, a sequel, and a third unnamed book. The publisher--not me--didn't want it to be a trilogy. (It's not my fault!) (Well, it kinda is.)
Inspiration:
I positioned the book as Lord of the Flies meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers: in other words, it's a bunch of unsupervised teenagers treating each other terribly and trying to survive, while also there being secrets as to who is really who they say they are. The book has also been compared to The Stepford Wives, The Twilight Zone, and Soylent Green--all comparisons I like.
The book was thematically inspired by three songs: Rabbit Will Run, by Iron and Wine; Sympathy for the Devil, by The Rolling Stones; and Going On, by Gnarls Barkley.
Rabbit Will Run was a huge inspiration for the character of Benson, because it is a song about how our inner nature's control what we do, no matter the circumstances. "The rabbit will run;" "the lion has nothing to fear;" "the pig has to lay in its piss." Benson is going to run--it's who he is. And the whole story is Benson both trying to run as well as fighting unsuccessfully against his nature.
Sympathy for the Devil inspired the whole thing with the conflict between the gangs, especially the idea that we are all the devil, or that we all have the devil in us. Mick Jagger sings about all of the places where Lucifer has been: "Killed the Tzar and his ministers;" "Rode a tank, held a general's rank, where the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank". And then he gets to "I shouted out 'who killed the Kennedy's" and then says "when, after all, it was you and me." WE were the ones who killed the Kennedys, meaning the devil is all of us: "Every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints."
Going On is the most literal inspiration, because it's literally about someone trying to escape and hoping that other people join him. "You can stand right there if you want, but I'm going on, and I'm prepared to go it alone... I'm going on, and I'm sure they'll have a place for you too." But it also gets to Benson's character when it talks about his personal drive: "Anyone who needs what they want but doesn't want what they need, I want nothing to do with. And to do what I want and to do what I please is first off my to-do list."
As for books that influenced Variant, the biggest is, plainly, The Hunger Games. This book was only made possible because The Hunger Games created a whole new market for Young Adult science fiction. My book came out riding the dystopian craze and often got lumped into dystopian, something that I didn't love from a pedantic perspective, but embraced because it helped me sell well. My cohort was Hunger Games, Matched, The Maze Runner, Divergent, and on and on.
Anyway, it's a neat book and I like it.