books! in! spaaaaace

[psocoptera]

So 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: I liked the mix of obvious and not-obvious in the twist. We know from the first page that *something* has happened, and we know from pretty early on who the players are and the approximate shape of the kind of thing they're up to, and yet Damico manages to take it one step further into something yet else, which I did not expect from this book, which, like, of *course* they weren't just a brain an athlete a basket case etc, but it's actually a good trick for the *book* to be more than it seemed. Unrelatedly, is "Esalen" code for "brainwashing" for everyone else, or was I reading that wrong?

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. So this book is everything I claimed it was above but also HOLY FUCK IS IT THE MINDFUCK OF THE YEAR. Because, very much like Waste of Space, partway through some things start to happen that call into question whether they are really in a hyperrealistic simulation, or whether they might really be on the first manned mission to Mars for real and being told it's a simulation for complicated metagame reasons. I was so immersed in this book and found this so intense that I actually had to stop reading it for a bit and switch books because of paranoia creep, like, I was starting to have a vague persistent sense of suspicion and unreality. When I came back to it it didn't fuck up my head any more but is still, like, so compelling and upsetting and fascinating to me. The unbelievable violation of (maybe) robbing these people of the (maybe) truth of this profound, unique, peak-of-human-potential experience - and then there's, like, is it actually plausible that you could trick experienced astronauts into not being able to feel what was really happening? But part of the point is about the power of belief to shape interpretation? And the power of interpretation as an engine for personal growth? Anyways, I'm not really sure how to signal to people who are into this sort of thing that they might want to read this without totally giving away the game, and it really is a fine piece of space-themed litfic without that, and from reading reviews, it seems like many people thought the twist was more of a sideshow than the center of the book. But wow.

Oh, they are all three 2017 books.

Comments

Genre and Content

[aryky]

Not going to talk about the books themselves, but as someone with an interest in genre studies I was interested in the idea of your multiple uses of "literary." My usual caveat in talking about genre is that a lot of the time genre is just a marketing category - so Margaret Atwood writes SF or Colson Whitehead writes an alternative history, but look at the authors, obviously these books are literary fic because that's who we market those authors to. But I really take your point about the multiple meanings of literary too. But on the third hand, "naturalistic character drama/portraiture" seems like too broad a definition for literary fiction based on content - because, for example, without having read Jodi Picault, I have the feeling that she would fit into that subject matter, but I don't think I would call her work "literary fiction." Now, that might be because of writing style, and because she doesn't fit sufficiently into the stylistic definition, but I think I would call it "realistic fiction" (even if it's for adults, not MG/YA) and not "literary." It's complex. On some level, I'd want to say that for me to really want to call something "literary fiction," it would actually need to hit both the style and content parts of your definition, but, on the other hand, the whole genre-as-a-marketing-category-thing gets in the way. The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake - definitely both SF and "literary fiction" to me. But is Samuel Delaney? I'm not sure if there's a clear enough stylistic distinction between Delaney and Atwood to have him not being litfic make any sense. . .

Re: Genre and Content

[psocoptera]

Interesting! I looked up Jodi Picoult and based on the descriptions of a few of her books on wikipedia I totally would have called them "literary fiction", by which I would have meant "the interpersonal dramas of people I don't want to read about". I mean, I'm sure part of the problem with me trying to define literary fiction is that sometimes I'm using it as an othering term, and thus probably any definition I might come up with is going to look as laughable to people inside the genre as when people who look down on SF try to define science fiction. "Those books that are on the library shelves and they're not sff or mysteries or thrillers or romances or historical fiction or any kind of sensible genre with an obvious appeal, they're just about people and sometimes people's therapists." Is "realistic fiction" the umbrella term I want here? I could make more of an effort to use words correctly... maybe... :)

Re: Genre and Content

[aryky]

I think it's not just you who's confused, but the world. Or, at least, I am certainly confused!

Given that everyone is confused, I don't know about correctness, but "realistic fiction" really seems like it should work to me. I mean, back in the day, in school, when I had to do book reports on different genres, the one that fit the "interpersonal drama" category was "realistic fiction." That was the genre for Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume and Harriet the Spy and whatever. It has the added benefit of implying absolutely nothing about the prose style and structural technique, so both The Baby-Sitter's Club and Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak would fit in despite being vastly different in terms of writing style and form. But I'm not sure that anyone does use "realistic fiction" as a genre for adults.

I had to go and look up "Jodi Picoult" and "literary fiction" after your comment, and the first hit I got on Google was this rather dismaying article, but that at least suggests that Jodi Picoult self-identifies as a writer of "commercial fiction" and that multiple writers see "commercial fiction" as a genre (which I had never been consciously aware of before). It also suggests that other people think of her books as "chick lit" (which I guess I had always assumed meant Bridget Jones's Diary?). Evidently Jennifer Weiner is also chick lit, even though, without having read her books, I've always assumed they were romance? Part of what's dismaying about the article is that it kind of suggests that the category I'm thinking of (books that focus on "interpersonal dramas" in a realistic setting without the focus being heavily enough on romance to make them romance, not written in a particularly complex/overtly crafted style) is "for" female readers, and offhand I can't think of a counterexample? I mean, there are certainly women writers who write "literary fiction," with the complex, overtly crafted style, whether that be Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson (both of whom I like and appreciate having had the opportunity to read for classes), or Joyce Carol Oates (whom I find as bad as Franzen), but I can't think offhand of any male writers who write the "commercial fiction" stuff that isn't clearly in another genre. The closest that I can come is Nicholas Sparks, and I think his books might be considered romance, anyway. And probably they're mostly marketed to women even if they're by a male author.

I knew that the etymological connection between genre and gender had a lot of resonance in the way that genre actually played out in the real world, but I don't think I'd realized that non-literary realistic fiction is for women before, and that kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth. . . .