book review: David R. Palmer, Tracking
Mar. 8th, 2011 01:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI learned recently that David R. Palmer had written a sequel to Emergence that was published in three parts in Analog in 2008, and individual back issues of Analog are available through Minuteman!
Sadly, it sucked.
No, wait, let me back up.
I adore Emergence; Candy is the Maryest of the Sues and the whole thing is just *gleefully* over the top. She's got a telepathic animal companion and she gets to pilot the space shuttle, for fuck's sake. Where do you even go from there?
Some of Tracking (the sequel) felt like a retread - she gets another telepathic animal companion, she takes another epic journey, and that was fine, although not super engaging. Some was just a little random - the map she needs is literally drawn for her *by Santa Claus*? Okay, why not, I guess that's one way out of a plothole.
But mostly the answer to "where do you go" seemed to be "guns. lots of guns." and also lots of bodies. Which... meh.
Candy kills two people in Emergence. One is - this is going to be a terrible phrase - arguably genuinely morally ambiguous. The guy is an abuser and completely unsympathetic, but it's pretty clear that Candy could have escaped without hurting him if she hadn't panicked and lost control, and she's traumatized by it in a way that has consequences later in the story. The other guy is a genuinely threatening villain - he's managed to fool the whole village of superintelligent near-mindreaders - and absolutely must be killed for the world to be saved, and it's still a big deal for Candy to do it. They're well-written, in their action-thriller way.
Candy kills probably 50 or 60 people in Tracking? I'm not even sure because after a while it's just action-movie rat-a-tat-a-tat. Except when she's using the katana which I guess is more of a swish. Could be 30. Could be 80. Who knows. And, look, I get it, violence is the standard for badassery these days - but in the original novel violence was one facet of her MarySue universal competence, and in the sequel we don't get to see her perform lifesaving surgery or choose heroic self-sacrifice or anything. Well, okay, there is one really awesome bit at the end where she has to land the plane with her eyes closed so she doesn't get blinded when the bomb goes off, totally worth the price of admission, but until then it's mostly killing.
There are a lot of other problems - some weirdly tangential racism, the total failure of the villains to be scary (but they're evil! they're so evil they're Soviet Nazi Middle-Eastern vivisectionist pedophiles!), the unfortunate decision to use sliding-present chronology (so Tracking is set in the present day and Emergence happened a few months ago, despite Emergence having been written in the 80s featuring 80s technologies - this also increases the oddness of the 11 and 13 year old main characters speaking in cultural references from the 40s and 50s, although there were a couple of very pasted-in movies from the 00s mentioned by title with no apparent knowledge of the contents, that really seemed like Palmer just Googled movies that an 11-year-old in 2008 might have seen.)
And there's no growth. No hard decisions - no personal struggle. (In Emergence, in contrast, she has to do things like taking off after what may be her only chance to find the superintelligent village under circumstances that will leave her family believing she's dead.) The very very end of Tracking shows Candy considering giving up single-handed heroism in order to be treated as a full adult member of the team, and *that's* interesting. I would have loved to see more of that, Candy trying to figure out whether there's a difference between what she can do and what she should do. Really what I want is a thriving Emergence fandom, with people writing stories about Candy growing up and figuring out who she is when she isn't saving the world, and Candy dealing with the next generation being even cuter and smarter and spunkier, and Candy discovering that being a black-belt supergenius with a master-chef-surgeon boyfriend does not necessarily make you automatically good in bed together, and Candy trying to figure out how to successfully integrate random difficult survivors into the village *without* violence. And maybe some sort of action sequence involving a volcano, volcanoes are good.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to create a thriving fandom for a TV show that aired in 2010, so trying to build one around a book from 1985 is an obvious lost cause. There's just *so much potential* there. Frustrating to see canon opt for a shoot-out.
Sadly, it sucked.
No, wait, let me back up.
I adore Emergence; Candy is the Maryest of the Sues and the whole thing is just *gleefully* over the top. She's got a telepathic animal companion and she gets to pilot the space shuttle, for fuck's sake. Where do you even go from there?
Some of Tracking (the sequel) felt like a retread - she gets another telepathic animal companion, she takes another epic journey, and that was fine, although not super engaging. Some was just a little random - the map she needs is literally drawn for her *by Santa Claus*? Okay, why not, I guess that's one way out of a plothole.
But mostly the answer to "where do you go" seemed to be "guns. lots of guns." and also lots of bodies. Which... meh.
Candy kills two people in Emergence. One is - this is going to be a terrible phrase - arguably genuinely morally ambiguous. The guy is an abuser and completely unsympathetic, but it's pretty clear that Candy could have escaped without hurting him if she hadn't panicked and lost control, and she's traumatized by it in a way that has consequences later in the story. The other guy is a genuinely threatening villain - he's managed to fool the whole village of superintelligent near-mindreaders - and absolutely must be killed for the world to be saved, and it's still a big deal for Candy to do it. They're well-written, in their action-thriller way.
Candy kills probably 50 or 60 people in Tracking? I'm not even sure because after a while it's just action-movie rat-a-tat-a-tat. Except when she's using the katana which I guess is more of a swish. Could be 30. Could be 80. Who knows. And, look, I get it, violence is the standard for badassery these days - but in the original novel violence was one facet of her MarySue universal competence, and in the sequel we don't get to see her perform lifesaving surgery or choose heroic self-sacrifice or anything. Well, okay, there is one really awesome bit at the end where she has to land the plane with her eyes closed so she doesn't get blinded when the bomb goes off, totally worth the price of admission, but until then it's mostly killing.
There are a lot of other problems - some weirdly tangential racism, the total failure of the villains to be scary (but they're evil! they're so evil they're Soviet Nazi Middle-Eastern vivisectionist pedophiles!), the unfortunate decision to use sliding-present chronology (so Tracking is set in the present day and Emergence happened a few months ago, despite Emergence having been written in the 80s featuring 80s technologies - this also increases the oddness of the 11 and 13 year old main characters speaking in cultural references from the 40s and 50s, although there were a couple of very pasted-in movies from the 00s mentioned by title with no apparent knowledge of the contents, that really seemed like Palmer just Googled movies that an 11-year-old in 2008 might have seen.)
And there's no growth. No hard decisions - no personal struggle. (In Emergence, in contrast, she has to do things like taking off after what may be her only chance to find the superintelligent village under circumstances that will leave her family believing she's dead.) The very very end of Tracking shows Candy considering giving up single-handed heroism in order to be treated as a full adult member of the team, and *that's* interesting. I would have loved to see more of that, Candy trying to figure out whether there's a difference between what she can do and what she should do. Really what I want is a thriving Emergence fandom, with people writing stories about Candy growing up and figuring out who she is when she isn't saving the world, and Candy dealing with the next generation being even cuter and smarter and spunkier, and Candy discovering that being a black-belt supergenius with a master-chef-surgeon boyfriend does not necessarily make you automatically good in bed together, and Candy trying to figure out how to successfully integrate random difficult survivors into the village *without* violence. And maybe some sort of action sequence involving a volcano, volcanoes are good.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to create a thriving fandom for a TV show that aired in 2010, so trying to build one around a book from 1985 is an obvious lost cause. There's just *so much potential* there. Frustrating to see canon opt for a shoot-out.
