rushthatspeaks | Feb. 10th, 2013

Feb. 10th, 2013

It's happened to every reader, at one time or another, in a bookstore or a library, at a friend's house with an eager friend awaiting an opinion or in a coffeeshop over what was intended to be a relaxing beverage. The cover was intriguing. The blurbs, solid. The premise of the book was interesting, or the friend promised it would be wonderful. The author has a good reputation, or is someone who has written enjoyable work before this. Sometimes it takes only a few pages before the bite begins to set in; sometimes entire chapters; and sometimes it's immediate, pressing, with the weight of disappointment: I cannot finish reading this book. It's too terrible for me to spend any more time with it.

As a private reader, that is the end of it. You move on to something else. As a reviewer, well. One has been sent a reviewing copy, and therefore one owes a review. But we all know there's one cardinal sin of reviewing, don't we? No matter how awful a work of art may be, it could, somehow, turn into something beautiful later. It's the reviewer's mandate to throw themselves on unexploded books, just in case, in case the last ten pages redeem the first two hundred and eighty. Thou shalt not review a book without reading it in its entirety.

And some books, for all one tries and tries with them, simply are not actually readable. I have tried time and I have tried alcohol; I have tried pacing and reading portions of the book out loud to myself in hallways in the dead of night; I have sat in a coffeeshop with my drink going cold, trying not to bang my head against the table. The Creative Fire is a badly written novel. It is poorly constructed, the prose is clunky and non-descriptive, the premise is not well treated, the characters are unappealing, and I cannot finish it.

I am as distressed at this state of affairs as you are. Probably, in fact, more so: because The Creative Fire is a rarity, a kind of book that hasn't appeared much lately, and I was hoping for its success not just on its own account and merits but because it had the potential to invigorate its entire long-neglected subgenre. The Creative Fire is a YA SF novel set on a generation starship. Those don't happen often. Genre readers are accustomed to thinking of the politics, plots, and possibilities of generation ships in the tone of the novels which formed the subgenre in the 1950s, such as Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky and Harry Harrison's Captive Universe, but more recent and less famous work such as Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of Day (about a ship full of Quakers) have proved that the mores and expectations of fifties SF don't have to inform a writer's goals and methods in a generation ship novel. The generation ship is out of vogue, and has never been a fixture in the young adult novel-- there have been a few recently, such as Beth Revis's Across the Universe, but they don't seem to have made much of a field-wide impact as of yet. But there is no obvious reason why this type of setting-- so artificially constrained, yet so elastic in terms of possible technology, of possible range of characters human and otherwise, of metaphorical weight-- should not adapt readily, beautifully, and in a variety of different guises to the concerns of today's YA, especially given the recent vogue for totalitarian technocratic dystopia.

Cooper is in fact attempting to bring the subgenre into dialogue with present YA; Ruby's Song, the trilogy of which this is the first book, will be when completed a retelling of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita in a technological dystopian setting, with the heroine, Ruby, rising from poverty and obscurity to prominence as a political leader and so on. This is by no means a terrible idea for a trilogy and had a great deal of potential. The problem is that none of the work required to make this plot plausible and interesting has been done. So little of it, in fact, has been done that it would be impossible to tell that the book is supposed to be a version of a version of the life of Eva Perón if the author's preliminary note did not mention it.

We begin with Ruby, the heroine, rescuing a member of her apparently-downtrodden apparently-colorcoded caste from officials of a higher caste. The higher caste, Reds, can apparently bully and arrest Ruby's caste, Grays. Except that for some reason Ruby is able to argue them out of doing that. We are informed that the Grays are laborers, who are looked down on and given very little in the way of privileges and amenities. Except that for some reason Ruby is a full-time vocal student, a singer, and we don't get information about whether this is exceptional and if so how it is exceptional; we also get told that the work the Grays do is actually difficult and delicate work involving robot maintenance on the ship, and it becomes increasingly implausible for them to be downtrodden and prey to bullying when the work they do is not only necessary to everyone's lives but requires a degree of societal investment in their training and their efforts. We are told that women are of lower status then men, especially women among the Greys, but Ruby is the person we immediately, right from the start, see use something that appears to be social status to get her way against armed and dangerous men without a fight. In short, not only is the worldbuilding handed over in unwieldy blocks of information, but that information is then directly contradicted by the actions we see taken in the text. If these contradictions appeared to be intentional, it might be very interesting indeed-- if the Grays believe themselves to be downtrodden when they don't really have it so badly off, or if Ruby really doesn't notice that she is behaving with social privilege when the text is perfectly aware of it. But the way the novel presents it all is very haphazard: we need to see that Ruby is a strong-minded person, so here she is being strong-minded, but then on the next page we need to have some reason why she can't just go around doing whatever she wants, so she will now remember that as a woman and a Gray she has certain disadvantages.

The book reads, basically, as though the author had a plot in mind and then manipulated the world of the book to make the incidents in the plot happen on an incident-by-incident basis, without considering the second-order or in some cases first-order consequences of the worldbuilding and the effects that this sort of world would inevitably have on the characters and plot. That is not, by itself, necessarily a book-destroying problem, but the characters themselves are shaped entirely by the plot in the same way. The only attributes we see Ruby having are the ones which are required for the plot to advance along its path. She also has whatever character traits are necessary to the plot regardless of whether those character traits are likely in her circumstances, or whether they contradict traits she's already been shown to have. And the prose all this is told in is so clunky that this all comes across as confusion rather than as layered complexity.

I also have a sense that taking the plot from an outside source and sticking faithfully to that plot may have served as an inhibiting factor on Cooper's ideas and on her sense of what was possible for the worldbuilding. Here is an excerpt from Cooper's author's note, at the beginning of the novel:

I am grateful, in advance, to all of the modern women who will forgive me for the way this story is told. I could set the story far into the future, but I could not remove the patriarchy or the story would not have felt possible. But after all, the patriarchy remains in many places on Earth today.

The assumptions behind these few sentences are staggering in their confusion and illogic. Why would no version of the story of Evita 'feel possible' without a patriarchal setting? If specifically gendered things about the ways Eva Perón came to power, held power, did not have power, and so on are what Cooper wants to explore in a story, and if these questions of gender require a patriarchal setting, why does the story have to take place in the future? If something about this specific future setting interacts with something about patriarchy in a way which produces an interesting story result-- which would be a good reason to write a novel about Eva Perón on a generation ship-- why is Cooper apologizing for having a patriarchal setting, since it is part of what for her makes this premise worth exploring? Why is Cooper apologizing for having patriarchy in a science-fictional setting anyway? Does she believe that the only purpose of feminist fiction is to give examples of non-patriarchal living situations? Isn't part of feminism, and one of the principal goals of feminist fiction, the analysis of patriarchy and its impact on human beings? For that reason, isn't it important to ask the question of whether the story of Eva Perón is one which needs a specifically patriarchal hierarchy to happen, even in the very far future when technology and living situations are different? What else about a generation ship might produce hierarchical power structures? What, in a generation ship setting, might produce a patriarchal society, or might prevent one from existing? What does the patriarchy remaining in many places on Earth today have to do with any of the above questions, beyond the evident authorial assumption that writing about a patriarchal culture, even from a position of opposition and critique, is something for which she has to apologize, and that somehow the continuing existence of patriarchy in real life means... means what for Cooper's book, exactly? That it's only all right to write about unpleasant things taking place in the future if they exist in real life? That it's more all right to write about unpleasant things in the future if they exist in real life? That it's only plausible to write about unpleasant things in the future if they exist in real life, or that the reader will be less distressed by unpleasant things in the future if those things are part of the reader's present experience?

Personally, I am distressed that Cooper finds it necessary to apologize, in the present day, for the work of her imagination in constructing a counterfactual future which is meant to be vaguely plausible but which is certainly not, in any way, intended to be predictive. Why is she asking forgiveness for her own imagination? If she spent a very long time attempting to build a generation ship scenario in which one could have a retelling of Evita without the patriarchy and failed to do this, wouldn't the likely courses of action be either to proceed unapologetically in the knowledge that she has no alternative, or to write a different book entirely?

This is what I mean by the plot serving as an inhibitor to the author. Cooper has not managed to combine her plot with her worldbuilding and her characters, but has simply allowed the plot to dictate everything except her book's science-fictional trappings. The result is total chaos.

The novel's first few lines are a great example of the confusion of the prose and the ideas. Traditionally the first line is a hook, intended to give some idea of the tone of the book, the sort of world it takes place in, the character of the narrator or narrative, and, usually, the very best of the writer's prose chops. The first line, and sometimes the whole first paragraph, is supposed to get the reader to take the book off the shelf and continue it out of sheer curiosity. Here are the first lines of The Creative Fire: "Four men in red uniforms surrounded three men wearing dirty gray work clothes. The reds muscled the less fortunate men down an orange hallway." This is a tangle of suddenly introduced numbers, colors, and concepts, with a referent whose antecedent is not necessarily immediately obvious (dirty gray work clothes does not automatically equal less fortunate, and due to the length of that clause we are more likely to remember the clothes as an attribute of these men then that they are, in one word, surrounded). It also, sadly, does give some idea of the tone of the book, the character of the narrative, and what we are to expect of the text generally.

And after a while of reading in which I continually had to refer back to previous sentences to try to make the sentence I was reading parse at all, in which I could find no consistent worldbuilding, in which character development was entirely sacrificed in the service of the overarching plot and yet in which that overarching plot was so unclear that as I have mentioned I would not have been able to figure out what it was if the author's note hadn't helpfully told me-- after a while of that, I simply could not continue reading The Creative Fire. I cannot in good conscience suggest that anyone else read it either.

I hope that more YA writers work with generation ships, in the near future. I hope that readers and publishers do not take this book as representative of its entire subgenre. I recognize that Cooper meant well and that her ideas are original and worthy of consideration. I hope that, in the future, either Cooper or other authors examine those ideas in a fully-fleshed-out and entertaining manner, in which worldbuilding and character unify with plot and premise to deliver a reading experience almost entirely different from the one I had. But, for the time being: Oh editors and readers, I have committed the cardinal sin of reviewing. For justification I offer only that, going into it, this book sounded as though it might be very good, and it was not, and in similar circumstances I would do the same thing again. There comes a time when life is too short not to trust one's own judgement on whether or not it is worth doing whatever it might take to finish reading something. And here, I trust myself that it was not, and leave the rest to you, the readers.