Eight One

The Mote In God's Eye

Like most fans of science fiction, the one thing I've always loved is worldbuilding. The skilled writer transports you to a world of their imagination, which has rich detail and surprises for you to enjoy.

Or it's like someone dropped the 1950s into space. In fact, in some respects the 1950s is generous since this often reads as though it's the 1750s. For instance, it sticks in my mind that people trade letters for mail. Even though they have "personal computers". Yes, it's a civilisation that has invented interstellar travel but still has mail packets.

It also has a sneaky Muslim, a woman who considers other women sluts if they use birth control and marries the "hero" without ever having any interaction in the book beyond thinking he's a hunk and when on a mission to discover an alien civilisation, thinks wistfully of how much she misses "girl talk". About cooking and dresses and shit, Scots who do comedy Scots accents, commoners who are grateful that the nobility do all the thinking for them, the scion of warlike people who is stiff and humourless, a Russky who is even stiffer and murdered tens of millions of people to teach them that communism sucks.

There are also some aliens. Who are comically deceptive, yet the humans prove unable to notice that they're nefarious.

It's readable in a sense but the sexism, racism, madarse conservatism, bootlicking and craziness of a space empire backed by religion, but not a new religion but basically if not exactly Catholicism (it wasn't clear). It's like the opposite of worldbuilding. These are writers who just could not be bothered to build anything. They simply transferred their own fondly remembered past into the future.

What's infuriating is that this is one of the best-loved books in scifi. But the story is as limp as the setting. I'd give it maybe two because it's easy going but shameful in how lazy and ineffective it is even so. Proof, were any needed, that rightwingers simply cannot do art worth anything.

posted by Dr Zen @ 7:25 pm