I tried to read the space brick

[cmdrnemo]

I have in front of me two wildly different things. The one is an hour and twenty minutes video on the restoration of a sixty year old lawnmower. I do not have a lawn, or a workshop, and do not do small engine repair. This is completely outside the realm of my interests. On the other is the sneak peek early access copy of To Sleep in a Sea of Stars. I am now fifteen minutes into the lawnmower video and page one of the book. This is the capacity this book has to entertain a classic sci-fi fan. Someone whose favourite books are listed as references for this novel and who is the exact target audience for it. For the rest of this, when not distracted, I’m just going to attach my thoughts as I go along.


Initial setting: An airless moon of an orange gas giant in a series of domed buildings connected by tunnels. The compound has “the” lab not “a” lab so there’s only the one. It contains a gene sequencer. So my initial thoughts are, that’s not how labs work. Think of a lab as a desk in an office. Everyone doesn’t work at “the” desk. Why does the lab on an airless moon near a gas giant have a gene sequencer? What genetics are there to sequence in two lifeless environments? The gene sequencer is large, heavy and wall mounted. But, Kira needs to move it for some reason. She immediately violates lab safety procedures thereby suffering a cut on her palm.

Small engine repair looks surprisingly fun and rewarding.

Kira hits the machine and starts whining about time away from Alan. Whom she has apparently been dating for the last year and have already had to spend several years apart. I guess they have a mutual love of time paradoxes and sucking at basic math. This might explain why she’s the xenobiologist on a mission to a lifeless moon. Either last year or many years ago she and Alan first met when surveying an asteroid. Another mission with zero need for a xenobiologist. Why are all her missions to lifeless rocks? Is she the galaxy’s worst scientist?

Restoring old machines is like pressure cleaning a deck. Just that constant reward of obvious progress. Remarkably satisfying.

Like she said earlier they’ve had several postings together. They work for a company and he’s a geologist. She wants to change careers and settle down. He wants to continue to explore the galaxy. It’s super boring. She’s annoying, whiny, boring, and not very smart. Those are the character traits this chapter is working hard to get across. I’m starting to have questions about these missions. Yes, aside from the constant why is a xenobiologist here, questions. I feel that a better book would have explained what these missions are trying to accomplish. Are these follow ups to automated drone surveys just to confirm valuable raw materials exist? Are they marking locations for mining equipment? Is mining even involved, that feels likely. But, what is the point of shipping small quantities of common resources at high expense back to sites that already contain large amounts of those same resources? They might be exploring systems for eventual colonization. Except that had better not be a short term mission. You want to observe a system for at least a few centuries first. No one wants surprise xenomorphs or giant meteors on colony year five.

Well there goes an hour twenty. Made it to page 6. In fairness that video was much more interesting than it first appeared.

Kira is expecting a reply from Alpha Centauri within two months. Alpha Centauri is a trinary star system 4.4 light years from us. With current technology a rocket ship accelerated to 1700 kilometers per second which is 100 times faster than Voyager 1 would get there in roughly 771 years. This is really the best we could do right now. The fuel costs to get a rocket going that fast would be insane. So, what is the tech like in this? Interstellar travel is apparently easy because these idiots keep getting sent off on short term missions. This book sucks. I need a break.

“Come on, you bastard,” she said, and strode over to the gene sequencer and yanked on it with all her strength. With a screech of protest, it moved.

You know what I want to see from a scientist in a space opera: brute physical labour.

What are you trying to accomplish with this opening? It doesn’t introduce the setting beyond “space opera” it doesn’t introduce us to the main character beyond “dudette likes people she likes” there is no conflict or tension beyond the arbitrary battle with the machine. We can’t sympathize with that because there’s no context for it. There’s no reason given to move this thing. There’s no information given here at all. It’s just empty words. It says less than I have!

I need a new video.

The next part starts with the traditional expedition’s end party in the mess hall. If only I knew what the goal of duration of these missions was. I’m going to assume they came out here to look at one rock and have been here for twenty minutes. That way when she spends an hour getting ready to celebrate the mission it feels as wildly inappropriate as possible.

Kira doesn’t want to go to the party. She just spent over an hour prepping for a work party with the same eight people she just spent twenty minutes looking at a rock with. Why not just show up? Blah blah blah, party is boring, can see why she didn’t want to go. It’s just a collection of redshirts with name tags. Why is there a botanist? Why does he have a crawler? He got sand in his skinsuit. On a moon it is called dust. So where were you botany boy? Did you spend this whole expedition on the wrong stellar object? The heck is a crawler that it can get that lost?

Turns out they’ve been on this moon for four months. It must have taken them a while to find that rock. Sorry, he’s not a xenobotanist, he’s a regular botanist. Which means he was driving around some random rock under an alien sun looking for regular Earth plants and fungi. I suppose we are going to discover that strawberries are the dominant galactic life form. Oh, it’s a prospective colony world.

So far they have a mess hall and are using the shorthand “regs” this is all very facist. It’s not how civilian scientists work at all.

So it turns out this moon does have air and even microbes. Which should, in a sane setting, take it completely off the potential colony list. Could you imagine the environmental activist reaction to importing alien life to a world? The ecological damage would be total. That’s a disaster of unprecedented scale.

My new videos are a series of yacht reviews. If I had a million dollars…

A drone goes down after detecting a potential new lifeform. This is treated, by Kira, as a minor nuisance she doesn’t want to deal with. Exactly the attitude we all want to see in the xenobiologist assigned to analyze future colony worlds. No wonder these people had to deal with something called the “Scourge.”

The biggest problem with this book so far is that things happen, then the story provides the context needed to make those things interesting or relevant. It’s like Kira took a shower. Turns out there was a spider in the corner the whole time. She knew that during the shower and did not like it. But, you get all that in this backward weird order and as a summary so you could never care. It’s just that over and over again mixed with references as subtle as a board with a nail in it.

I’m going to stop here. Wishing I had a yacht with some sort of workshop on it. Possibly the most pointless machine ever created. Because nothing that ever happens in this book is going to be interesting. But, it will absolutely satisfy the author’s fans because once you already know the context for everything it does sort of work. Since they will get through it on rosy glasses alone they’ll have the interest without context and the context in hand to justify it all afterwards.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

"Someone whose favourite books are listed as references for this novel and who is the exact target audience for it. For the rest of this, when not distracted"

Agreed. Dune, Hyperion, Starship Troopers, etc are all books I've enjoyed, or in the case of Heinlein, at least made me think, even if I didn't wholly agree with some of his views. This... this is melatonin in text form...

For all the research done, the lack of life experience shows right off the first page. I read this to a friend of mine who has no real interest in scifi outside of films or shows, and even they pointed out the lack of wheeled equipment and the fact she contaminated with her blood. This isn't rocket science, just common sense

[hidden_urchin]

What really stood out to me was the lack of resource-based thinking. For instance, Kira's dress. Not only is it something entirely impractical, with only one (frivolous) use, it's something that has a tangible cost when you're living on the margins: either it costs energy to transport it as weight aboard your ship, or it costs matter, time, and energy to fabricate on-site. One of the redshirts "printed" a pair dress shoes, just for the party. Again, that's using matter and energy for a non-practical purpose. Alan's flowers: grown only to be destroyed.

What's more is he's created a contradiction in his worldbuilding. They grow their own food "partly to reduce the amount of supplies they had to bring with them." In other words, resource-use should be a problem, but they don't act like it is, which totally removes any possible tension (and undermines the worldbuilding).

I think this lack of resource-based thinking and scarcity is one of the reasons the first chapter comes off so flat. These could be any middle-class Americans meeting at the end of any work project. If he'd built scarcity into his world, we'd get more tension and color. What if they're wearing work clothes because that's all they have? What if, instead of a dress, Kira's wearing a scarf with her work clothes--the only personal item light enough to bring with her, one she's carried from post to post? What if the redshirt does manufacture dress shoes, knowing she'll catch hell for it from their company, but she doesn't care because she's had it with them running her life, and this is her last hurrah? What if the reason Kira has to go after a drone is not that they don't have time to create another, but they don't have the materials?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm reminded of Dune and Dr. Yueh talking about how much was being wasted on trees that were just there to flaunt the Imperial wealth. But you bring up a good point, if things are scare, they seem only when the plot demands it. The chap. with the flowers was sentimental hogwash, written to convey mood, I suppose, but left me thinking... huh, how much soil and water was wasted on that? That's a cucumber, an herb garden, etc that went down the drain! I guess 3D printers are magic and the concept of diminishing returns is lost on CP... not surprising at all.

[cmdrnemo]

Or... Let's say each department has a resource budget for all the items they need to bring or create during a survey. Then the party at the end is a: after the transport to pick them up has already landed and all the gear that is getting returned is already aboard and b: everyone blowing the last of the budget on frivolous crap with some metric they all know about so it properly shows off how good they are at what they do. Then when Kira shows up with 2 kilos of light fabric it's not much of a showing. So there's the reason she isn't excited about the party. She is going to lose the little end of effort contest. Which also means yeah. They don't have more drones to send. The next batch of drones comes with the follow up team and [legitimate reason] has delayed them so they won't get here for a few months. Which means this one needs to be fixed. And the longer she takes to fix it the longer everyone has to wait around for her to get back. Then she'd at least be a bit of an underdog and the audience would have some reason to care about her.