Moving Mars by Greg Bear

*Spoilers Below*

I kind of can't believe this book was nominated for a Hugo. I mean, Greg Bear is often a very good writer, and I've enjoyed previous books of his. Not this one, though. This one was just plain bad and there were several points where I thought about putting it down and walking away. When I was scrolling through my Hugo spreadsheet and realized that it had been nominated, I was flabbergasted.

The science in this science fiction is interesting, but the fiction, particularly the characters, particularly the main character, is just really not good. The lead is, from her internal monologue, dumb as a post, both in regards to the things she's supposed to be smart about (politics) and about other people and human relationships.

All her reactions seem so far from being human that I not infrequently stared at the page in disbelief. This woman is mercurial beyond belief (or the author kept forgetting what she was supposed to be like), petty, sulky, and childish. And yes, she's young, but even when she's sent to Earth from Mars on a diplomatic mission, she behaves like she can't understand anything. Inexperience is fine. Willful avoidance of thinking anything through, when you were sent as one of the best and brightest? Less fine. And not every character has to be brilliant, but characters who don't know anything at all are not that interesting.

Which is nothing compared to how badly the relationship scenes are written. The dialogue is so hackneyed, the things they say, they ways they say them...if this book had any sex scenes I have absolutely no doubt they'd be going into my Bad Sex Writing In SF Hall of Fame. Oh, and the gender politics, ugh. I can usually take old science fiction, even when it is a little less than what I'd want, but any time a book goes into great detail about how a second date means a woman owes a guy marriage, because on Mars, people don't mess around with relationships, my antennae go up. I mean, what? When you're in your early twenties? And you have free choice of marriage, not arranged by anyone, and you're supposed to know from one date if you want to pairbond for life? What the hell kind of sense does that make?

(Which isn't to say a science fiction author couldn't come up with a society where this was the case, but they'd have to do a damn sight more thinking about how and why that would arise, and let the reader in on it. It would have to permeate more than just that one aspect of life, the cascading differences such a change would make.)

And then we get into the main character's father lecturing her about how much power women have, and how inviting Charles to visit should mean an engagement or else she's just toying with him, and for all I don't like the main character, she's feeling fairly understandable reticence to decide her romantic future in a couple of meetings, and this scene made me feel kinda gross.

Then, THEN, she meets someone and falls in love with him, and none of it comes across on the page. The character says she falls in love with him, with about as much description as that, and it's so shoehorned in that it's apparent that she's fallen in love with someone so the author has someone to take away from her later. You can practically taste the cardboard. The whole marriage is so distant and unconvincing that it doesn't matter, even though it should.

AND THEN! IT GETS WORSE!  Near the end of her book, her husband dies during an altercation between Mars and Earth. And the dude she didn't marry from the beginning of the book, who her father told her she was leading on by wanting more than two dates before marriage, comes to her, and starts to put all his goddamned emotional labour on her! He wants her to reassure him that she doesn't blame him for the death of her husband, he wants her to take care of him. When she is just fucking widowed and he has lost no one.

AND SHE DOES! AND GOES ON TO TELL HIM SHE ALWAYS LOVED HIM! This is a dude you kick to the curb and don't look back, honey, not one you then decide to spend the rest of your life with.

So, if human relationships and characters are not this book's strong suit, I guess I can talk about what is. In tone, it's extraordinarily like Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. It's about Mars asserting its independence, and the political machinations thereof, although Bear jumps to Earth attacking Mars very quickly.

But then there's a new technology thrown into the mix, just to keep things interesting. Quantum something or other means that the scientists on Mars learn they can manipulate the fundamental descriptors of reality, including moving objects, the larger the better. With the title of the book, you can guess where we go from there. This is genuinely interesting! It would just help if the characters and relationships matched the idea.