I’ve been working my way through the Nebula winning novels and I’m about ready to give up. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve only got four more to go after this and so I’m only two weeks away from finishing I’d give it up. Of the last eleven books there are three I would rate at least decent and only Nicola Griffith’s Slow River stands out as exceptional. On the other hand there are four so bad that I consider them attempts on my life. I already warned people of The Terminal Experiment but I had not reached the horrors of The Quantum Rose. I’m only fifty pages in and I want to file a lawsuit for the brain cells that have been killed by putting that much stupid in them.
Here’s a simple planetology problem for you that most people can make some guestimates for. We have an approximately earth sized satellite of gas giant that orbits its star every twenty-five years in a “highly elliptical orbit”. Its rotational period is sixty hours and a location in a temperate latitude on the winter solstice has a 5 hour day/55 hour night. Air pressure appears to be a bit less than earth’s (I’m going to guess about .7 atmospheres; enough that someone not adapted cannot breathe but not so much that people who are adapted don’t have their lungs rupture when they enter Earth normal pressure). The local star is active enough that auroras are clearly visible in the night sky at temperate latitudes. Does an unprotected person on this planet:
A. Freeze because they’re at least 9 AU’s on average from the local star.
B. Boil since if they get enough energy from the star to keep the planet warm a 55 hour day on the summer solstice would cook them.
C. Have their skin flayed off by the katabatic winds measurings hundreds of miles per hour which are created by having major temperature differences on opposite sides of the planet and a thick atmosphere.
D. Killed by the high radiation their star is apparently constantly putting out which is causing the auroras.
E. Killed by the massive dose of radiation streaming off the back end of the gas giant they’re orbiting.
Even if you can’t tell that there’s a dozen ways this planet should be completely uninhabitable just the general numbers should jump out as a signal that there would be major problems living here.
But let’s say you’re not familiar with middle school science and so the numbers don’t make you immediately go “Wait a second, how’s that supposed to work?” In that case how about the fact that in the society in this book a person must take an offer for something if they cannot give the person making the offer more. This includes offers for people. It would take less than ten minutes for that society to collapse under that system. Picture this exchange:
“Hello there sir, I want to offer you one dollar for the hand of your lovely daughter!”
“Bah, take two dollars and go away!”
“In that case I offer you three dollars!”
“No, here’s four and leave now!”
“How about seven then?”
“How long will this take? I don’t have all day.”
“You have to give me 2^n-1 dollars and your daughter where n is the offer for which you don’t have 2^n dollars.”
“Dammit! Then I offer you for you to stay there until I get my gun!”
Yes, people have to pay more to keep their stuff and have people not do things. No, I’m not misinterpreting things: it is that insane.
Of course a warning sign is the fact that two of the reviews on the dust jacket are from Romantic Times and The Romantic Reader. Just the two publications I look to for science fiction. This book is terrible on so many levels…
I went back and read some more reviews after I finished it, and I think most people’s problem with the book is that they took it too seriously.