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books! in! spaaaaace
Sep. 28th, 2017 12:11 amSo I love it when themes or parallels spontaneously pop up in my reading, but sometimes I choose books deliberately that have something in common, and this was one of those sets. Meg Howrey's The Wanderers is about three candidates for the first manned mission to Mars going through a realistic simulation of the mission on Earth. Gina Damico's Waste of Space is about teenagers chosen for a reality show set in space - fake, but the teenagers aren't told that. Anne Corlett's The Space Between The Stars is about the survivors of a catastrophic plague that it was only possible to survive by being alone. So, wanting space, wanting Space, and getting along with other people in constrained environments and circumstances.
Quick opinions, then I'm going to go into more detail about each book, and then a spoiler cut for Waste of Space, some filler, and a spoiler cut for Wanderers. Wanderers: really good but you have to be okay with literary fiction. Waste of Space: fast read, lands a couple of good hits. Space Between: do not bother.
Wanderers. The other day we had to go to Target, but Q announced that we were actually going to Space Target, which is like Target but you take everything that goes in a Target and bring it to space. Space Target is obviously way better than normal Target, right? Likewise, I'm mostly not interested in the long explorations of people's thoughts and relationships of literary fiction, but make them people who want to go to *space*, and suddenly I am so into it. (Aside: I've realized that I use "literary" in two different ways - one is when I want to talk about books where the language is particularly complex, well-crafted, or beautiful, or that employ devices like recurring imagery and metaphors, and the other is "literary" as a genre referring to naturalistic character drama/portraiture without speculative or "heroic" elements. Hm.) Wanderers is a deep, slow imagining of what kind of people want to be astronauts, what kind of people make *good* astronauts, how their being astronauts affects their families, and how a long-duration mission could change them and their relationships. You might like it if you like Atwood or Chabon, or if you thought KSR's Mars trilogy would have been fine without all the cool engineering bits, or if you think you'd still like The Martian if it had vastly more introspection and vastly less peril.
Waste of Space is mostly heavy-handed satire of the reality TV industry, and a little bit of the kinds of people who might get involved in space-themed reality TV specifically (the incredibly gung-ho wannabe astronaut, the obsessive Trekkie). It's done in a found-footage format combining transcripts of "aired" footage from the show with "behind the scenes" documents like emails, unaired footage, diaries, etc. It's a mix of comedy, some very YA bits about how none of the kids are quite as simple as they first appear, and mild mystery/slow reveal about More Going On. Breakfast Club In Space meets Comedy Hunger Games meets Lost.
Space Between The Stars dreams of managing the sharp character insight of The Wanderers, but doesn't. Also this is the most inaccurately titled book ever: the protag spends all of three days alone, has found other survivors by page 25, and by page 100 they've been to like three different planets, which the ship can apparently just bop between in a day or two. How does that convey a sense of the real size of space. It really wanted to be set in the post-apocalyptic UK but I think the author got enamored of the title phrase and was like "let's do it in The Future even though I don't want to do any worldbuilding and all the clothes and tech and cultural references will be 20th/21st cen". Also the survival rate is supposed to be "one in a million" - or maybe it's more, but not *much* more - but includes *two* key people from the protag's former life? Like, no, you are not earning my buy-in here. A good enough book could pull it off as essential to the allegory but this is just a muddle.
Spoilers for Waste of Space:( Read more... )
This paragraph is filler, in case you don't want to be spoiled for Wanderers. I would strongly suggest not reading the spoilers if you intend to read this book. Like, seriously, turn back, back button, blah blah blah,
carriage return
carriage return
okay I think everyone's eyeballs had a chance to stop?
Wanderers spoilers. ( Read more... )
Oh, they are all three 2017 books.
Quick opinions, then I'm going to go into more detail about each book, and then a spoiler cut for Waste of Space, some filler, and a spoiler cut for Wanderers. Wanderers: really good but you have to be okay with literary fiction. Waste of Space: fast read, lands a couple of good hits. Space Between: do not bother.
Wanderers. The other day we had to go to Target, but Q announced that we were actually going to Space Target, which is like Target but you take everything that goes in a Target and bring it to space. Space Target is obviously way better than normal Target, right? Likewise, I'm mostly not interested in the long explorations of people's thoughts and relationships of literary fiction, but make them people who want to go to *space*, and suddenly I am so into it. (Aside: I've realized that I use "literary" in two different ways - one is when I want to talk about books where the language is particularly complex, well-crafted, or beautiful, or that employ devices like recurring imagery and metaphors, and the other is "literary" as a genre referring to naturalistic character drama/portraiture without speculative or "heroic" elements. Hm.) Wanderers is a deep, slow imagining of what kind of people want to be astronauts, what kind of people make *good* astronauts, how their being astronauts affects their families, and how a long-duration mission could change them and their relationships. You might like it if you like Atwood or Chabon, or if you thought KSR's Mars trilogy would have been fine without all the cool engineering bits, or if you think you'd still like The Martian if it had vastly more introspection and vastly less peril.
Waste of Space is mostly heavy-handed satire of the reality TV industry, and a little bit of the kinds of people who might get involved in space-themed reality TV specifically (the incredibly gung-ho wannabe astronaut, the obsessive Trekkie). It's done in a found-footage format combining transcripts of "aired" footage from the show with "behind the scenes" documents like emails, unaired footage, diaries, etc. It's a mix of comedy, some very YA bits about how none of the kids are quite as simple as they first appear, and mild mystery/slow reveal about More Going On. Breakfast Club In Space meets Comedy Hunger Games meets Lost.
Space Between The Stars dreams of managing the sharp character insight of The Wanderers, but doesn't. Also this is the most inaccurately titled book ever: the protag spends all of three days alone, has found other survivors by page 25, and by page 100 they've been to like three different planets, which the ship can apparently just bop between in a day or two. How does that convey a sense of the real size of space. It really wanted to be set in the post-apocalyptic UK but I think the author got enamored of the title phrase and was like "let's do it in The Future even though I don't want to do any worldbuilding and all the clothes and tech and cultural references will be 20th/21st cen". Also the survival rate is supposed to be "one in a million" - or maybe it's more, but not *much* more - but includes *two* key people from the protag's former life? Like, no, you are not earning my buy-in here. A good enough book could pull it off as essential to the allegory but this is just a muddle.
Spoilers for Waste of Space:( Read more... )
This paragraph is filler, in case you don't want to be spoiled for Wanderers. I would strongly suggest not reading the spoilers if you intend to read this book. Like, seriously, turn back, back button, blah blah blah,
carriage return
carriage return
okay I think everyone's eyeballs had a chance to stop?
Wanderers spoilers. ( Read more... )
Oh, they are all three 2017 books.
