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alias_sqbrI've started reading "Pushing Ice" by Alistair Reynolds, and it's not bad, but it's a particular type of story I tend not to like, and I've been thinking about what other stories have hit the same buttons and why they irritate me.
Vague spoilers for "Pushing Ice" and maybe "Sunshine".
GENERALISED SUMMARY:
Setting: usually present day or near future. A remote outpost or spaceship or submarine or something.
A group of people are in this place on some mission. They are, to a certain extent, trapped there.
The story spends some time introducing the characters and setting. All good.
Either as the centre of their mission or by sheer luck they encounter a Mysterious Alien Thing. We learn just enough to make me intrigued.
And then we spend the next hundred pages or whatever bogged down in interpersonal drama and random generic thriller shenanigans that have nothing directly to do with the Mysterious Alien Thing but threaten to Kill Them All, and probably will kill quite a few of them in pointless, frustrating, unnecessary ways. Government conspiracies, selfish human greed, miscommunication and petty stubbornness, jealous ex lovers blah blah blah MAYBE THE TRUE MONSTER HERE IS MAN. And I don't care, I'm not here for the human drama, for some reason the way the worldbuilding of this future society and the characterisation of the characters is done I don't usually care much about them, especially not now they're all killing each other and getting in the way of the plot, I'm here for the goddamn Mysterious Alien Thing and the author is refusing to tell me anything about it except for the odd tidbit sprinkled amongst all the blah.
And then if I do sit through it to find out about the Mysterious Alien Thing half the time it's unoriginal and boring and I end up wishing I hadn't wasted my time. I've heard good things about Alistair Reynolds so hopefully this one won't be.
Another example that comes to mind is Ice Station by Matthew Reilly. I gave up on "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson when it got bogged down in similar boring frustrating interpersonal drama and the carrot wasn't a Mysterious Alien Thing but the terraforming of Mars. I don't find find terraforming very exciting.
None of this is to say the genre is inherently bad, I can intellectually understand why the formula is so popular, but personally I find it really frustrating. There's just something about the way these stories go that makes me Just Not Care about the characters.
I guess the genre can blur into the sort of horror story where a Mysterious Freak is slowly killing off the cast one by one ("Sunshine" is, as far as I can tell, in the intersection). I like that genre even less, from what little I've seen of it.
I had some examples of similar books I've liked, but I realised they were all in far future settings where the plot of investigating the Thing takes us through a world that is interestingly science fictiony all by itself. And maybe that's my problem: minus the Thing "Pushing Ice" could almost be set on an oil rig or Antarctic mining base or something. There is nothing inherently bad about thrillers set on oil rigs, but they are not what I am interested in reading.
So: do other people recognise the type of story I'm talking about? Any other examples? Do you like them? Not like them? Think I'm missing something?
Vague spoilers for "Pushing Ice" and maybe "Sunshine".
GENERALISED SUMMARY:
Setting: usually present day or near future. A remote outpost or spaceship or submarine or something.
A group of people are in this place on some mission. They are, to a certain extent, trapped there.
The story spends some time introducing the characters and setting. All good.
Either as the centre of their mission or by sheer luck they encounter a Mysterious Alien Thing. We learn just enough to make me intrigued.
And then we spend the next hundred pages or whatever bogged down in interpersonal drama and random generic thriller shenanigans that have nothing directly to do with the Mysterious Alien Thing but threaten to Kill Them All, and probably will kill quite a few of them in pointless, frustrating, unnecessary ways. Government conspiracies, selfish human greed, miscommunication and petty stubbornness, jealous ex lovers blah blah blah MAYBE THE TRUE MONSTER HERE IS MAN. And I don't care, I'm not here for the human drama, for some reason the way the worldbuilding of this future society and the characterisation of the characters is done I don't usually care much about them, especially not now they're all killing each other and getting in the way of the plot, I'm here for the goddamn Mysterious Alien Thing and the author is refusing to tell me anything about it except for the odd tidbit sprinkled amongst all the blah.
And then if I do sit through it to find out about the Mysterious Alien Thing half the time it's unoriginal and boring and I end up wishing I hadn't wasted my time. I've heard good things about Alistair Reynolds so hopefully this one won't be.
Another example that comes to mind is Ice Station by Matthew Reilly. I gave up on "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson when it got bogged down in similar boring frustrating interpersonal drama and the carrot wasn't a Mysterious Alien Thing but the terraforming of Mars. I don't find find terraforming very exciting.
None of this is to say the genre is inherently bad, I can intellectually understand why the formula is so popular, but personally I find it really frustrating. There's just something about the way these stories go that makes me Just Not Care about the characters.
I guess the genre can blur into the sort of horror story where a Mysterious Freak is slowly killing off the cast one by one ("Sunshine" is, as far as I can tell, in the intersection). I like that genre even less, from what little I've seen of it.
I had some examples of similar books I've liked, but I realised they were all in far future settings where the plot of investigating the Thing takes us through a world that is interestingly science fictiony all by itself. And maybe that's my problem: minus the Thing "Pushing Ice" could almost be set on an oil rig or Antarctic mining base or something. There is nothing inherently bad about thrillers set on oil rigs, but they are not what I am interested in reading.
So: do other people recognise the type of story I'm talking about? Any other examples? Do you like them? Not like them? Think I'm missing something?
no subject
Date: 2010-09-18 05:35 am (UTC)I do like the fact that there's no demonised Other in a disaster film, and they tend to avoid the things that make Monster films annoying for me, but I also tend not to find them very compelling.