In which The Lives of Tao kills any remaining scraps of my sympathy

[sunnyskywalker]

Fuck this book.

You know what ruins a fluffy alien spy adventure? This:

"I've always viewed God as very fair. Girls in their twenties--the world's their oyster. They're beautiful. Older men want to date them. Guys pay for everything, and everyone desires them. Men on the other hand, when we're in our twenties, we're dumb, we're poor, and women our age want nothing to do with us. [...]

"How things even out is that women might shine bright, but they burn out fast. Their lives are over by thirty. What do you geeks call it? Half-life? Shelf life? Whatever. It's shorter than for us men. They have to find the right guy right away or it becomes a game of settling. [...] Guys are like wine. We get finer with time. We start earning money. We become more confident. We become more distinguished with age, and younger girls will still date us."

FLAMES. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE.

And what is the wise immortal alien's response to this?

I like this guy. He is quite the philosopher. [...] In another time with the right Qasing, he could have been a Nietszche or a Voltaire!

DID I MENTION FLAMES.

Randomly telling huge swathes of readers that they're worthless by the advanced age of fucking thirty: great marketing idea!

Even if Tao is supposed to be understood as sarcastic there--and I have no evidence that he is--the entire passage has no relevance whatsoever to the rest of the book. Roen's girlfriend's dad could have been intimidating and protective without comparing women to perishable goods or radioactive material. Knowing that Jill grew up hearing such insulting opinions from her dad doesn't give us any insight into her personality or actions, because we barely see any to speak of. We barely see her, period. The book is not interested in deconstructing or even depicting sexist narratives, so this isn't part of that kind of project. Literally nothing ever comes of this passage. It's just there, like a giant turd in the middle of the book.

So basically I was just reading and nodding about the secret alien brain parasite civil war and then suddenly GUESS WHAT, SUNNY, YOUR LIFE IS OVER NOW THAT YOU'RE THIRTY.

Yes, I'm expired like bad milk. Also, I have not started making more money than I did in my twenties, nor have I become more confident. These things only happen to men. Clearly, I am delusional. I should just shuffle off and resign myself to a life of spinsterhood, or perhaps settle for a douchebag if I'm lucky. Because my life is over.

Thanks a fucking bunch, Wesley Chu. That really brightened my day.

Also, guess what: I HATE WINE.

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

I kept waiting for the wise immortal alien to rip the argument apart or some other satisfying smackdown. I mean, the book is blatant wish-fulfillment, so surely we'd, well, get that wish fulfilled? Nope. Not a bit. And I'm honestly not sure whether the author was just clueless enough to think that obviously readers would get how wrong Jill's dad is (haha if only) and, I don't know, imagine a satisfying smackdown of their own somehow, or if he meant it seriously. And I don't care, because whatever he was thinking, it's awful on the page.

There's a tricky balance between inventing a secret history where aliens or witches or a secret society have been around forever and influencing history without people realizing, and inventing a secret history where the Secret Whatsits are responsible for literally everything and the rest of us are like furniture or something. This book falls into the latter camp. I like "hidden" histories, but loathe the ones where the Secret Whatsits are the only things that matter in history.

I'm generous this morning and will allow that most books have flaws that will sink them for someone, and that books I like whose flaws I can overlook for the parts I love are someone else's NO WAY IN HELL books. For other people, maybe this one has enough of... something... that it still works for them. But it's firmly on my NO WAY list. Just can't stand it.

It's just so exhausting! I need lots of breaks from the anger or it's too much to bear. I'd like some fluffy wish-fulfillment for me a little more often.

There's a few modern writers I like, and I try to reassure myself that in classic lit times, there were lots of terrible writers too but they haven't survived, so looking at lists of new books and going "ugh... ugh... ugh, not that either" isn't a new problem. But it's hard some days.

[needled_ink_1975]

I'd expect the Secret Whatsits to be better than us, and if they're not, then I expect the human characters to prove that we're better, emphatically (I think this is half of Star Trek and Star Wars narratives? I'm not into Sci Fi, so forgive me if I got that wrong). If neither is happening, then, umm, what's the point?

And I get what you're saying: reading is your downtime, your entertainment. When it makes you (or me) mad and sad, it's not much fun. Dunno about you, but that's why I started writing– I write what I wanna read. Been doing that since I was 14, because I couldn't find those stories in the library.

I personally think that the trouble with bad!fic all over shelves of expensive new books has to do with the bullshit gatekeeper idea that the publishers have of "what will sell". The worst is that readers, consumers go with that idea, which reinforces it, so we have a vicious circle. So yeah, getting mad and staying mad is really tiring, but if there were more of us angry, saying, "Not reading that crap and I'm certainly not buying it," it might jostle that gatekeeper idea of "what will sell", just a tad.

One little point: you wrote that awesome little spite!fic, because you were mad, right? In my experience, some awesome-beyond-measure fiction has resulted because writers got mad about something. Just one example: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

So when next you get mad (and sadly, you will), maybe bring about your own wish-fulfillment, and write something that fixes it?

[sunnyskywalker]

Aliens who can't figure out how to get off this planet after tens of millions of years don't deserve to be secret puppetmasters, at least. I think most reasonable people would agree on that.

I'd be okay with humans and Secret Whatsits who were different but roughly equal, and the conflict comes from the secrecy (what it takes to keep the secret, what drove them into secrecy, why they risk meddling, etc.), but that's so rarely handled well even when it is done. Usually you get stuff like this, where they're allegedly so superior that they're responsible for every important historical event ever, but turn out to be far worse than promised when we actually see them. (Usually whether they're supposed to be Good Secret Whatsits or Evil Secret Whatsits doesn't even matter much, because Way Eviller Than Humans is just another way of saying we're nonentities, not to mention is usually written so badly that it trivializes real historical atrocities. And the Good Secret Whatsits usually seem pretty evil anyway.)

Sometimes I love fiction that delves into all the awful things in the world and shows us how the awful systems work, and the human cost, and how people try to survive (e.g., Octavia Butler's science fiction, which is both brutal and full of compassion and amazing). When I read those kinds of books, though, I know to brace myself for what the characters are going to go through. Sometimes I want something lighter. What I really, really don't like is when an author is clearly trying to write something light and fluffy, but throws in horrible stuff like this as if it's nothing... because to them, it probably is nothing. Or maybe it's actually part of the wish-fulfillment for some people somehow? Either way, it adds a whole extra layer of awful to it.

I've been steadily trying to fill my shelves with a combination of books where stuff like this is recognized as a problem which causes the characters suffering, and books where the authors try to imagine realities where (some of) these problems don't exist. And it's complicated, because sometimes something that bothers me in one book is something I can gloss over in another, because that other book does something for me that the first one doesn't, or maybe I read it while in a different mood or at a different part of my life... But anyway, I am trying to support the authors who are doing things I like, and avoiding others I just can't stand. Not sure how much it helps, but at least I have a few good things to read.