Three things I read this week

Hail Mary, Armenian Radio, the worst paragraphs

I have a long term goal. I’d like to read Nietzsche and understand what the hell he’s going on about. Right now I can read ten pages of his work in half an hour, I’ve done it, but I can’t synthesize that wisdom into anything remotely intelligent. The words are like eating a bowl of plastic coated Cheerios.

I’m interested in Nietzsche because I’d like to have a firsthand opinion. The man is so controversial that you can find very intelligent people who say he’s full of shit, and others who hang his picture on the wall so they can bask in its stoic goodness over their daily cup of murdered God coffee.

I hope that a decade from now, some four hundred books later, I might have enough synapses firing that I can finally decipher this interesting man’s philosophy. One idea at a time, I drag myself a bit closer to the great mustache.

1 - Hail Mary

This review contains massive spoilers…

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An author who wants to write a bad book has an entire shopping cart’s worth of shitgredients to bake his literary catastrophuck with. To paraphrase Tolstoy, “Good books are all alike; every shite book is shite in its own way.”

The failings of today’s bad book, Project Hail Mary, are so brash that even a loosely trained apprentice such as myself can identify the grapefruit-sized tumors. Two malignancies are particularly egregious, stakes and the moral dilemma, and we’ll split the rib cage in that order.

Stakes

I love the movie Predator. Arnold Schwarzenegger battles it out with a hyper-deadly alien assassin in the lush jungles of Central America, and the movie expertly conveys the stakes to the audience. Arnold’s crew is a bunch of badasses, hardened soldiers down to the last man, but the predator picks these guys off like they’re unguarded toddlers stumbling by the local sex offender’s house. The threat is clear: the villain will kill everyone if he can’t be stopped.

Hooyah!

Unlike Predator, Project Hail Mary buggers the stakes so bad that they’ve started farting silent. We’re supposed to believe that the fate of the planet is in the hands of our astronaut protagonist: Comic Relief Action Person, but Crap doesn’t act like a man with grave responsibilities.

There is one spaceship, earth’s last hope to stop the space algae that’s eating the sun, and Crap is the only man aboard. The fate of the human race is on the line yet we’re treated to hilariously inappropriate dialogue like, “Maybe I’m being emotional instead of rational. But so what?” Crap says, as he casually risks his life for no fucking reason.

What a twat. The fate of the human race is at stake, you imbecile.

Maybe this is just a modern book for modern audiences, written for a generation of people who prioritize emotions over logic. I don’t know, but with writing this incongruous you just know that the author is a few batteries short of a fully gyrating dildo. Crap doesn’t take his mission seriously, so how can we?

Moral Dilemma

Halfway through the book Crap meets an alien. Within all of about sixteen minutes they’ve decided to be besties, and in all of about eight days they’ve learned to communicate and are having a holly jolly time together just chummen it up. Their encounter is so perfectly saccharine that when the waiter brought me plain ice tea I put Project Hail Mary in my glass to sweeten it up a bit.

Crap and alien boyfriend have a bromance for about a hundred pages but alas… Space is a violent mistress and something goes wrong. A fuel tank explodes! The situation is volatile, rapidly approaching disaster, and Crap has to make a difficult choice. He can either save his spaceship and keep humanity’s hope alive, or he can rescue his alien boy toy. This is a moral dilemma. It’s an important part of storytelling because it forces the protagonist to make a choice that reveals something of their character.

For example, in Breaking Bad the two protagonists Walter White and Jesse Pinkman shackle a drug dealing thug to a pole in the basement. Walter loses a coin flip so he’s assigned the morally repugnant task of dispatching this superfluous human. But Walter is a school teacher, not a murderer. As the audience we can sympathize with his crisis because, while we’ve hopefully never been in this exact situation, each of us has been in a scenario with no good outcome. That is how life works. You’re given a shit salad and your only choice is whether you’ll eat it now or later.

Walter chooses murder.

A schoolteacher goes into the basement, the drug kingpin Heisenberg walks out. A pivotal scene in the story, the moment when we realize how far Walter will go to fulfill his ambition.

Returning to a far inferior caper, Crap is in a dilemma too. He can either save himself or his alien love interest, which is it? Choose! Despite Andy Weir’s best efforts, tension actually creeps in… What will we learn about Crap? Would he really jeopardize humanity to save one— OH WAIT NEVER MIND. Alien hunk sacrifices himself before Crap can make his choice.

What a waste. This scene could have gone in a dark direction, and that would have been unpredictable and interesting. But instead it’s all so fucking bland and lame. Just go watch Breaking Bad, it’s a way better story than this desiccated offering.

I’m giving Project Hail Mary a hard pass, and I look forward to never reading it again.

2 - Armenian Radio

A fictional radio station from the Soviet Union, used as the backstop for humorous anecdotes.

This is Armenian Radio. Our listeners asked us:
“Is it all right to have sex in Red Square?”
We’re answering:
“Yes. But only if you want lots of advice.”

This is Armenian Radio. Our listeners asked us:
“Why is our government not in a hurry to land our men on the moon?”
We’re answering:
“What if they refuse to return?”

This is Armenian Radio. Our listeners asked us:
“What is chaos?”
We’re answering:
“We do not comment on economic policy.”

This is Armenian Radio. Our listeners asked us:
“What is ‘Russian business’?”
We’re answering:
“To steal a crate of vodka, sell it, and drink the money away.”

These were taken from The Tiger, by John Vaillant.

3 - Giving it up

Jill Heinerth, the author of Into the Planet, recounts how difficult she found it to give up her high paying career and posh apartment to move to the Bahamas and make diddly as a diving instructor. Jill would later go on to become one of the most respected cave divers of our time.

Decisions of such considerable magnitude are hard to make, and they take time. Family expectations and convention forced me into a convenient and predictable life-script: Grow up. Go to university. Work in a professional career. Have kids. Toil until retirement and delay satisfaction until you have earned it. But what if I never made it to retirement? Why couldn’t I live happily now and let the rest of my life sort itself out? I felt as though my thoughts were traitorous or selfish, as if I was betraying society, my family, or womanhood. Each diving experience shifted me toward a road less taken, but I wondered if I would lose my friends and family if I abandoned the expected path.

It should have been easy to walk away, but choosing an unconventional life is worrying, no matter how passionate you feel about it.

I love this passage because it reflects some of the mental anguish that accompanies an unconventional lifestyle. Choosing to do a thing because it feels right is fine on paper, but much harder in real life as you look your boss in the eye and prepare to hand in your resignation. How many people turn back rather than give their two weeks? Who among those will die with regrets?

4 - Pines

Pines made me wish that Gutenberg had died of the plague when he was seven. I’ve enjoyed several other books from Blake Crouch but this one was twelve day old fish.

On a more constructive note, here’s a trick to identify sloppy writing.

The luster of pure rage in the creature’s eyes was unmistakable.

That’s a sentence from this humanitarian crisis of a book. Words like pure, always, never, forever and to a lesser extent, perfect, should be avoided at all costs. There are so few absolutes in our grayish world that the use of the definitive is rarely accurate.

“Pure rage,” what the fuck does that even mean? I have a hunch that if we spent more than six seconds digging around in the cliché bin, we might find a better way to bring this scene to life.

The creature gazed at him him like a jaguar calculating the caloric content of a lost child. The beast’s head motionless on a branch, the midnight pupils sweep a slow arc as they track the mud-dappled fleshsack stupidly stumbling closer to its last handful of seconds on this pitiless Darwinian planet.

I think that adds a bit of pizzazz to an otherwise predictable description. Jaguars aside, your own writing will be much improved if you stop using words like always/never/pure, unless you’re absolutely certain that they’re an accurate descriptor.

5 - The absolute worst

She languidly stretched her swan like neck looking up from her venti 10-shot, 2-pump mocha, nonfat, extra whip, with 5 shakes of cinnamon stirred in, at the long legged, lithe, and burly cowboy leaning in the doorway smoothing his flowing hair back and returning her gaze with a passion that ionized the air between them, and thought, “I should have gotten 3 pumps.”

And…

The man squinted his eyes as the blistering cold winds battered his rugged face, his eyes darting about, desperately hoping, daring to dream that amidst the frozen wasteland, he would find the last Klondike Bar that he had hidden in his freezer.    

Finalists from this amazing thing: Since 1982 the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest has challenged participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written.

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