Orbital Decay, Allen Steele

Today I've been reading Orbital Decay. I am unimpressed. The primary narrator is a male science fiction author who goes to work on a space station to add realism to his book. Everyone is male unless Reasons. The Reasons is always so they can flirt with / be desired by men. One man has this terrible depressing problem of his ex wife insisting on having sex with him a lot. He always gets other women just eager to go home with him and she always chases them off and decides to have sex with him instead. I mean, humans are many and various, but somehow I don't see this as the main problem with ex wives. One space disaster happened because a woman was distracted by thinking about her boyfriend breaking up with her, so she didn't do her quality control job. After that I read the next time a woman shows up with some trepidation, since she's a shuttle pilot who got little sleep because she's mother to a one year old, and she spends the whole section thinking about her baby and wondering if she should even be in space any more. Plus flirting with the new guy while reminding him she's married. Because that's how women act. But it turns out the point of the section was for her to decide she likes space after all, because this new guy reminds her, so now she owes him a favour.

I mean, there are women, they talk, they even have skilled jobs. It's just seeing them through the eyes of this narrative is repeatedly uncomfortable.

It's not that they're uniquely incompetent, everyone seems to hate their jobs and be bad at them and dislike their coworkers and mostly argue with people. And yet. Not liking it.



I nearly gave up on reading when this latest woman was introduced with a long paragraph about how she really wants to be a stay at home mother. But I finished the chapter and it kind of fixed it. So I guess I'll give the book some more rope.

Not considering it worth the shelf space thus far.





Also I keep on repeatedly tripping over how old SF really could not get its head around computers and how fast they've developed, or data density in storage media. There's characters going nuts of boredom because they couldn't fit their own music or players in their weight limit. I mean, I think could get a terabyte USB thingy now, and it'll play on something that weighs less than a deck of cards, yet everyone has cards in space. I can understand why they didn't understand, but wow is it jarring.

The future from here is pretty much going to look like magic. Sufficiently advanced technology is just about go already. It's just going to be unevenly distributed.

Futures are weirder than we think and weirder than we can think, so I can't knock the past for missing.

Orbital Decay, Allen Steele

So, I finished reading the book.

*blinks*

Okay, so, it turns out that the way it writes about women is among the least of this book's problems.

( Read more... )

If the point of the book is that humanity is kind of shitty and there will be arseholes wherever we go, well, point made.

If it actually believed its own rhetoric about the outcast pioneer heroes... *shudder blergh*



I am not even slightly tempted to seek out further works by this author.