Bookfail: White Mars

[tigerfort]

I think I have to give in on this one; it's simply too tedious and offensive to finish. I've managed about sixty pages and have yet to find anything that makes me think there will be anything in the rest that makes it worthwhile ploughing through the mind-numbing text and revolting sexism. I cannot imagine recommending this book to anyone for any reason, except possibly as a doorstop if they have a copy lying around for some reason.

(Update on books towards the hundred to come later. I don't really think this one counts :)

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

There was a book which I started recently, and didn't finish, because its central oh-so-clever premise was offensive and not really that clever at all.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

See my responses to shimgray and emily_shore for more detail, if you're interested.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

I am glad to see my reaction wasn't unique.

So, the question; is this Aldiss, or Penrose, or the tragic combination of both?

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

A bit of both, I think. Aldiss' best work was done forty years ago, and he was never either a hard-science man or one of those who explored social themes well. But while his writing was a bit stilted in some ways, the books were still interesting - books like "non-stop" and "hothouse" are respected for good reason, and I've dug out my copy of (nebula-award-winning novella) "the saliva tree" out of the to-read pile in the hope that it'll remind me that he used to do better than this. But I've never seen an Aldiss story in which women aren't completely subordinated to the men, even when they're allowed to actually do things, so I think a good chunk of the sexism is his. Penrose has almost certainly contributed substantially to the unreadability (Aldiss good stuff flows much better than 'White Mars'), and is responsible for the tedious (sometimes basic, sometimes speculative, sometimes wrong, sometimes just plain wacky) technical talk between characters. All the stuff about consciousness as an emergent property of magnetic fields is Penrose, too, and his apparently fervent belief in it seems to be slowly turning him into the new Fred Hoyle. I have no idea how sexist Penrose may be, but he is almost 80....

[emily-shore.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing this doesn't have anything to do with Kim Stanley Robinson?

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Written by Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose as a sort of response to KSR's Mars books. The tragic thing in some ways is that there is an interesting (and potentially important) argument to be made that terraforming is a bad thing to do, but this book (by being unreadably tedious and offensive, and in the part I've read by not really discussing it beyond "terraforming bad" "my goodness, you're right") completely fails to make it.