Oops! Science, science, science, it must be another novel from the self-proclaimed space nerd, Andy Weir. I was bored by the potato farming astronaut in Weir’s novel, The Martian (see my review of 4/15/2014)...would I be bored with a lone amnesiac man in space waking up twelve lightyears away from earth in a ship to another star system? Not really, but give Weir a chance (476 pages) and he will try to bore you to death with tech. But he does have a way of coming up with original premises. Stranded on Mars, stranded in deep space. Andy Weir stretches out impossible situations better than most sci/fi writers. Imagine arising from a medically induced coma to find your other teammates dead in their pods. Where are you? Who am I? You are not an astronaut, you are a science teacher. The two bonafide space cadets are skeletons in their coma-induced capsules. Is that Tau Ceti e on the screen or Earth? The sun looks a lot bigger...what’s going on? There is so much to tell the reader, but I don’t like spoiler warnings. The author kept me interested (for the most part) with excellent writing and by employing the proper use of italics and quotation marks. That’s always a biggy with me.
Meet Ryland Grace, the sole survivor of Earth’s last chance mission being grilled by a computer after waking up from a very long sleep. “What’s two plus two?” “lrmln,” I say. I’m surprised. I meant to say “Leave me alone”...what’s going on? I want to find out, but I don’t have much to work with. I can’t see. I can’t hear anything other than the computer. I can’t even feel. No, that’s not true. I feel something. I’m lying down. I’m on something soft. A bed. “ I’m pretty sure I was in a coma.” Eventually after Ryland wakes, he realizes that he is in a spaceship very far from earth. How am I in another solar system? That doesn’t even make sense! What star is that, anyway? Oh my God, I am so going to die! So begins Ryland’s long wandering journey. The author smartly weaves back and forth from what happened to him on earth to his current mission in space from here on in. Well done. Without giving away part of the story, one very smart major character of Weir’s novel doesn’t (like me) understand Einstein’s theory of relativity! Hooray!
As I mentioned above, I don’t know if an author like Andy Weir trips over himself because he can’t stop displaying his knowledge of technology or he is trying to get to 500 pages. The end result is a terrific story waylaid by too much geek talk. Some of the most heralded authors are guilty of the same quirks. Take Herman Melville for example. In Moby Dick (1851), he spends hundreds of pages boring the reader about the whaling industry and its lore while barely holding on to the reader’s attention to an otherwise remarkable novel. James Joyce (Finnegan’s Wake-pub. 1939 and Ulysses-pub. 1922) is probably the valedictorian of difficult reading. If you tell me a rocket’s engine runs this way or that way, I’ll believe you without your torturous (for me) reasons why. Got it, Weir?
RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
Comment: Are Russian novels tough to read? They were until I got smart and started taking notes on the character’s names. I read and loved Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (see my review of 11/17/2014) because I wrote down the character’s multiple names as they came up. For instance, the main character is Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, but he is also known as Rodya, Rodka, or Rodenka. And don’t forget the terms of endearment that I haven’t even mentioned. Haha. Rodion’s girlfriend is Sofya Semyonouna Marmeladov, also known as Sonya, or Somechka. I’m sure there is a logical reason for this, but I don’t know anything about their language. I’ll take notes and enjoy the Russian classics.
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