Strange Blessings (with possible minor OMW spoilers)

[akirlu]

So I finally started reading John Scalzi's Old Man's War. I can see why it took a while to find a publisher. What I can't see is any resemblance to Heinlein's writing. I'm bored. Seriously. Here I am on p.21 and Nothing. Has. Happened. We've got a protagonist and a discursive lump. The protagonist is sexually uptight, whiny, and shows no signs of being a man of any particular degree of action, or likeability. Even in his dotage, Old Man Heinlein wouldn't go twenty pages at the very beginning of a book without hooking our empathy, setting up a plot conflict or two, and getting us some action. Scalzi is still scene-setting.

Spending that much time scene-setting has some pretty serious dangers, too. It gives a reader too much time to think. Here we are, in an America far enough into the future that there's translight drive, and planetary colonies 80-odd light years away, and yet most everything earthside looks like America circa 1960. Wifey cooks the meals, old folks are nervous of people with weird tattoos, information pamphlets and magazines are all paper copies that are sent in the mail, and military recruits have to drive a car to a physical office the next town over to be processed into the military. Pretty clearly we're totally ignoring the turd in the punchbowl here, but what happened to women's lib and all of tattooed, pierced, tribaled-out Gen Y? By the time we hit Old Man's War's America, why aren't tattoos a quaint affectation of a previous generation of old fogeys? Are we going out on that level of world-building, or do we do reprise of song get some sort of explanation? Since Scalzi's already doing all this other explaining in lieu of anything happening now, why not explain the weird future now, too? I'm not filled with warm fuzzy confidence in the author providing a payoff. With Heinlein, you had confidence right from the start.

But there's an upside. This is exactly the kind of book that kicks me out of the story each time I get frustrated with the author's approach to his material. I end up thinking about how I would attack it differently, and that leads to thoughts of stuff I should be writing of my own. If this goes on; if I persist in reading Scalzi, I stand a good chance of getting up a new head of writerly steam. Blessings are where you find them.

Comments

[avram]

Have you gotten to the part where he spends two or three pages telling you what a space elevator is? That's where I gave up.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I think I'm just on the verge of that. Two or three pages? Yoiks. I can see why you dropped it. But I'm serious that a certain kind of bad writing is, for me, an excellent tool to push me back to doing more writing of my own. Lagom-bad writing a precious commodity. The trick is finding writing that is Just Bad Enough that I can keep pushing through it and gain the associated jab to sit down and do more writing, and not so bad I become tempted to start reading something genuinely enjoyable instead.

[ozarque.livejournal.com]

Not only is that a really cool post that I enjoyed reading, you have saved me from reading Old Man's War, freeing me up to read something else entirely. Blessings are where you find them, for sure.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

And the first time we meet someone who is not white it's to be told that there is no racism in This Man's Army because We Are All Green Now.....

And oddly, all with European names.

This is just about excusable in the beginning--he could come from a white suburb after all. But once the protag moves out into the military, well, where are the Changs the Singhs and the Pestalozis? Heinlein would never have written an all white future America.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I get the sense that Scalzi's actually pretty pleased with himself for having 'avoided' the question of race in that way.

Which just serves to remind me of one of the other annoyances of the Read So Far. In describing the recruitment office, he enumerates the items in the room, including a 'human' behind a desk, which telegraphs for miles ahead the reveal that nowadays the 'human' behind the desk "has breasts". Really. Like the coy-but-clumsy genderless word choice didn't make that painfully obvious anyway.

I find I have a growing sense that Scalzi (or to exercise the Principle of Charity, his narrator) thinks he's rather a lot cleverer than in fact he is, and it sets my teeth on edge.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I think he does deal with this that the Colonial Union banned emmigration from the US and Western Europe, focusing on India, China and others. Of course, that raises other issues that these are still supposed to have high poverty rates in 100 odd years time...

Essentially though, all the Military are, for the purposes of the story White Middle Class Americans.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Um... even with immigration to the US banned from *now*....

where are all the Changs and Sings and Pestalozis? Are they not middle class enough after fifty years and more of settlement? If so, this is not *our* America.

I;'m awfully tired of reading future Americas that clearly descend from a parallel world that deviated in 1950.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

There are quite a few Polish names in the military units (I think), the hispanic are missing which is weird given percentage of the population that is represented even now.

I remember seeing a panel at an Octocon with Joe Haldeman and Harry Harrison where they basically said the problem with a lot of technology that was potentially coming (i.e. molecular nanotechnology) was they couldn't see how to write about a civilisation where all the current rules of scarcity disappeared.

It's a problem of imagination for some people I think.

I've just finished Helix by Eric Brown and that's a dire book from this stand point.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

:Helix:

One less book for me to read then.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, the worst book I've read this year by a significant margin.

All the flaws you cite here, and a few more. At least the characters in Old Man's War behave in an intelligent way. They approach problems from a sensible direction and make good use of technology (at least once they get off Earth). I really struggle with a book set in 2095 where the tech level appears to be stuck sometime in the mid/late 90s.

I also wish that writers who want ethnic diversity would write diverse characters rather than sticking an ethnic name on a character who behaves in every other respect like a white middle class male.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I'm not an especially _critical_ reader, but, yeah, I found Old Man's War slow going and just marginally entertaining and stimulating enough to continue reading, and the sequel seemed only slightly better. If memory serves (obviously, I didn't find them memorable) there's a single Earth Government over planets in many star-systems, handling relationships (mostly involving warfare) with five or so Alien Races. I know it's set in The Distant Future, but when that aspect comes up I constantly find myself doubting that Homo sapiens could possibly improve that much. Maybe my Imagination has been corrupted by contemporary World Politics, but when I don't see _any_ large country being governed well, or more-than-barely-competently, for more than a few decades, I have a lot of trouble with the concept of an Inter-Stellar Empire.

Scalzi seems to be a pleasant and interesting person, and his blog is often enjoyable & stimulating, but his fiction doesn't seem to be written for me.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

The sequel was better and the third book vastly better as he deals with some of the real inherent problems of his set up in the other two books, which you pick up, is the idea of a government of any kind really having any control over that many star systems.

By the third book he's obviously spotted the flaw and was busy trying

I commented when I read it that based on my impression of him from his Blog and the later books, it was highly incongruous to find him lauded over and publicised on Blogs which I would not have suspected i.e. Glenn Reynolds.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Perhaps Reynolds just saw "war" in the title of the first book and thought it had to be great.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

This would be consistent with much of Glenn Reynolds analytical technique.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I reckognize that Scalzi's more politically liberal than Reynolds, but I dunno. I think a White-Boys-in-Space Opera (with GUNS!) is exactly the speed of SF for crypto-racist soldier wannabes like Glenn Reynolds. And it's possible (I don't read enough military SF to know) that by military SF standards, Scalzi's level of worldbuilding is the shit. And LOTS of Reynolds' reading audience is rather remarkably uncritical when it comes to seeing the failings of thought or fact in his writing, so the phenomenon of lemming after Reynolds isn't at all surprising to me.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Didja know that a recruiter working for the military is looking for soldiers in jails?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard that one. Oh. my. dog.

[fritz-freiheit.livejournal.com]

If you haven't seen this, you might want to check it out:
http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=48

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

There's always been a slightly false ring to John Scalzi's "Hey, lookee, aren't the negative reviews cute?" schtick. To me this reads like yet another opportunity to rile up the fawning fanbois and get a compensatory ego-stroking from them, while having other people bash the Evile Reviewer on Scalzi's behalf without him sullying his own Aw-Shucks-Easy-Going-Man-of-the-People persona. Not that I would suggest that a man who writes promotional copy for a living might be the slightest bit artful or disingenuous. Not me.

[fritz-freiheit.livejournal.com]

And I thought he was being humble... :-)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

And indeed, that's what you're supposed to think. Possibly it's even true, and I'm just excessively cynical.

[fritz-freiheit.livejournal.com]

And that is why we love you, Uli. (No, seriously, we really do...)