preliminary, spoiler-free bad impressions of Jack McDevitt's "The Engines of God"

[cimorene]

My parents left me several books when they visited. The one I started reading last night is called The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt. Now, I've been having White Man overload for a bit more than a year now, and was at first willing to discard this book unread because the author's got a male name. My parents sang its praises a lot though. Apparently it's the first in a series, and both of them are impressed by the strong female protagonist. Dad also assured me that it was not written in bestseller style (ie switching frequently between many points of view), which is one of my biggest pet peeves, and from the cover I was kind of getting a "read me if you liked Greg Bear" vibe, and I don't like Greg Bear at all, so.

Anyway, it was free, I'm waiting for Wax to finish with the new Pratchett, and I picked it up. Right away I have a few problems.

1. The opening scene takes place on the moon of Saturn, examining a gigantic ice statue of an extraterrestrial alien. Within this scene, they:
   
   
   • Say that the statue is "obviously" a self-portrait. Apparently you can tell by looking at it.
   
   
   • Conclude that the artist/subject was "obviously" alone there, even though they have clear evidence that it travelled via some sort of vehicle, because they found one set of footprints.
   
   
   • Mention that the statue is "obviously" female, again, by looking. We later learn that it's winged and possibly somewhat reptilian. Are you fucking kidding me? You can't even tell which sex is which from looking on all the species of animals that live on earth, let alone an alien! Who's to say extraterrestrial aliens should even reproduce sexually, or have two sexes, or if they do have two genders, or if they do be distinguishable by sight? Especially to an alien race whose sum total knowledge of the race comes from one statue? They don't even have another representation of the species to explain how they came to this conclusion. It appears to be drawn from the statue's posture or facial expression.
   
   
   • Proceed to project all kinds of emotions that the alien was supposedly feeling based on its explicitly non-humanoid facial expression.
   
   
   On top of all that:
   
   
2. The prose feels a little... stale, or should I say dated? Or just like it was written by an old person. I suppose this is because of its genre membership. I probably wouldn't bother finishing an epic fanfic I started if it was written in this style.



3. In two chapters I have met a woman who may or may not be the strong character mentioned. However, I've also been in the POV of two different men, which is suspiciously close to bestseller style for my taste, even if all the threads are at least obviously connected to the same plot. Also, one of the strong female astronaut's scenes may have been on the surface of Saturn's moon, but another one was back on Earth, angsting over and stalking her ex-boyfriend.

I haven't decided to give up on the book at this point, but I'm annoyed on multiple fronts and the book will have to be very awesome in multiple ways to make up for this shit.

Comments

[twistedchick]

In what way do you see the prose as dated or stale? I'm curious.

[cimorene]

Hm, good question. I haven't thought about it a great deal, but what stands out to me at first glance is the huge amount of past perfect tense and the quantity and placement of exposition dumps, particularly containing not-immediately-germane information that strains the POV credibility (why is  [POV character] mentally going over the entirety of this story right now?).

POV-straining and otherwise incredible exposition dumps are commonplace in bad to mediocre writing, of course, but usually they're handled more roughly, so that I at least can believe the author couldn't possibly know better. When they take the time to attempt to make the edges of the exposition dump blend in, however, it shows that they knew there was something wrong, so if it's clumsy, confusing, or stilted they have no excuse.

[phosfate]

Haven't you seen Dark Crystal? They can tell by the wings!

[cimorene]

Not since I was old enough to remember it. Maybe I should fix that.

[pandarus]

When they say it's obviously female, don't you think this is a coy way of saying "...and it had these massive tits on its freakish alien body!" ?

[cimorene]

But why would an organism from another planet have tits? And if it appeared to have them, since it's an alien, it wouldn't be a sign that it was obviously female! So even if that was the intent (not exactly supported by the cover art, but then, that doesn't mean much), it doesn't gain any points whatsoever.

[pandarus]

Oh, no, I'm not quibbling with your logic, which is exemplary; I just suspect that "obviously female" is Old White SciFi Dude-speak for "had big sexy bare breasts despite not being human". 'Cause you sounded puzzled as to what he meant, and I think he meant that. I don't think it gets him points, because it's stupid, but I think that's what it meant, from your description so far.

::shrugs::

[cimorene]

Oh, I got that. Your hypothesis is plausible! Having finished the book I can now say that we never got any more information about that one way or the other.