You do want to be a human, don’t you?! I knew it! Gosh, the whole human thing is so *in* right now. Fineeee I guess I’ll play along. Lucky for you, the lovely people at Simon & Schuster Canada approached me to champion one of their fall SFF releases for young adults and the tour is allll about being human. *collective groans while everyone assumes I’ll be screaming about Erin Bow’s book yet again.* Muahahaha not this time, friends! I will be flailing about S.J. Kincaid’s The Diabolic. I’m so so so so so so excited! So buckle up (your belt…humans wear those, so you should to) and let’s get started!

To kick off this explosion of awesome, S&S has posed two questions.

A) Why did you agree to champion The Diabolic?

B) What do you think it means to be human?

Taking it easy on us, clearly.

Let’s start with the more simple one. Why did I agree to champion this book?

No, seriously, me gusta. I’ve had people telling me about this book and tempting me to need it since MARCH. This book has been haunting me for months. I’ve had it for a little while now and it was on my “soon” TBR but then S&S asked me to do this and my immediate reaction was:

Ruthless humanoids, space, political drama, deception. All of that makes me salivate. Add the cover to the package and I literally cannot say no to this book.

 

So, to summarize: That cover, that synopsis, THE DIABOLICS. OMG they’re so badass.

Now for the hard part. What do I think it means to be human?

To be human, one must be able to flawlessly use an excessive amount of GIFs. Just kidding. The very basic answer would have to do with biology, naturally. I’m bad at science so I wont venture down that path but step one, you must be the right species of mammal.

As a general rule, one should also be kind, caring, compassionate and more or less ‘good’ in order to be human. Sure, even the best humans do crappy things from time to time (sorry not sorry, spiders) but generally they’re pretty rad. There’s a reason we refer to people who do heinous things as “monsters”. We dehumanize them because there is no way we can accept that a human would do something so awful.

In summary:

Step 1: Be the right species

Step 2: Don’t be a monster

Step 3: Make sure you’re actually kind of good

There you have it! There are obviously a lot more complexities to the whole “being a human thing” because we are not simple beings but this is the essence of humanity.

Let me know what YOU think it means to be a human!