OK, I really wanted to like this book because it's written by a local author, it's about Mars (and I dig astronomy), and it's also about apartheid South Africa (which I would like to learn more about).But I really struggled to get through this book.
Like, really really struggled.
For one thing, the author is not a professional writer. He's an aerospace engineer and professor at a local university. I won't go so far as to say he can't write, because that would be unkind and unfair. But the language in this book is simply not natural. I think that's the best way to describe it. The sentences sound funny as you're reading them because you know that writers don't actually write this way, and people don't actually speak this way. The language is stilted. Certain turns of phrases are obviously borrowed from other books -- which is fine, to a certain extent, but there's so much of that here that you get annoyed.
It's weird, because there's a lot of overly simplistic language in this book, but there's also a lot of ridiculously high-flung vocabulary that feels very out of place. (We used to call it "SAT vocabulary" because it's the type of vocab you'd be tested on during the SAT exam. You know what I mean -- words like abstemious, exegesis, quiescence.) The average reader (myself included) wouldn't know most of these words offhand, so seeing heaps of them in a novel like this is a turn-off because you're like, Geez, do I need to have a Funk and Wagnalls sitting next to me while I read this book? This kind of vocabulary in a book that is otherwise very simply written just comes off as pretentious and, again, highly unnatural.
Also, I think this book may have been published by a low-budget publisher, which is fine, but there are a lot of typos -- missing quotation marks, misspellings, incorrect commas, that sort of thing. Maybe I'm being picky because I'm a technical writer/editor by profession, but this kind of thing drives. me. mental. It's very distracting when there are errors all over the place. I couldn't really focus on the story half the time.
And when I could focus, I didn't like it. The story is obviously WAY out there in fantasy-land, which is fine because you know it's a science fiction book, but it turned out to be so absurdly "way out there" that it's almost comical. The basic premise is that South Africa has decided to launch a manned mission to Mars in order to distract the world from its apartheid screw-ups. And essentially they find that Mars is inhabited by a highly advanced civilization of black people who disguise themselves as white people to see whether Earthlings are truly racist. And when these Martians find out how racist the South Africans are, they decide to blow up Planet Earth.
Ummmmmmmmmm..OK.
Look, I am the first person to admit I know nothing about apartheid. Really, very little. As students in America, we didn't learn much about it (and I'm guessing the same is true in Australia). This isn't intentional, I don't think -- it just doesn't play a huge role in our curriculums the way that the Holocaust does, or the Civil War, or the Cold War.
That said, I just found this book's treatment of apartheid to be too...defensive. Radical. Something like that.
In the same way that I have a hard time believing that all slave-owners in the American South were black-hating racist d-bags with horrible evil hearts...well, by the same token, I also have a hard time believing that all white South Africans were black-hating racist d-bags with evil hearts. I mean, obviously not every white person in this book is a hateful racist, but like 98% of them are, and I think that's weird. Yes, again, I don't know much about apartheid, so I could be wrong, but something about this book just comes off as needlessly judgmental. Yes, apartheid was horrific. Yes, unspeakable racism was prevalent during that time. We know this, and it makes us sad and angry to think about how so many people suffered during apartheid. But to go to some of the lengths about "white people hating black people" that this book goes to -- it's just a bit bizarre to me, and wrong.
Basically, the South African astronauts on board the ship to Mars are all whites, and all racist -- save one, who is actually a British scientist who emigrated to South Africa. And I even feel like his "non-racism" is actually just a cop-out, because the author makes a point of this character being really sexually attracted to black women. So it's kind of like, Oh yeah, he's not racist -- but only because he thinks black women are hot. Um, what?
There is some sexism in this book, too. There are virtually no female characters of any real strength or character here. The astronauts' wives all seem dopey and sentimental and tearfully idiotic. There are a couple of Martian women who seem promising, but their characters are never really developed at all. The worst part is the female robot "sex kitten" types that the Martians send to the astronauts when they first land on Mars. The female robots are disguised as beautiful, young, curvy, real women who show up for the sole purpose of having sex with the South African astronauts, an idea the Martians came up with so as to put the astronauts at ease. I mean, wtf?
And the descriptions of women in this book are all about their appearance and sexuality, or their abilities to be good wives and mothers. Nothing about women being scientists, either in South Africa or on Mars. Nothing about women playing an important role in society, aside from being a sex symbol or a "good wife," in either South Africa or Mars. It's just degrading, and demeaning, and to me it detracted from the message of racism because it was hypocritical -- I mean, we can have sexism but not racism?
Anyway. I do try and give the author credit because, like I said, he's obviously not a professional writer and I do understand that, but this book failed on so many levels that I pretty much read it with my lip curled in disgust half the time. I barely managed to finish this book; it was such a struggle. And really, the only reason I did finish it was because of this blog, and my little project to read through the fiction books at the Melbourne City Library.
