SciFi for the MBA

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach - Kelly Robson

It used to be that libraries had a section they called “Fantasy and Science Fiction,” but most libraries and bookstores now separate the two. I don’t know the official difference (Wikipedia probably does), but in my world, fantasy is derived from “sword and sorcery” and Science Fiction involves speculation about how the scientific advances will change humanity’s future. Ignore Steampunk and VampRom for now – that’s what I do. Fantasy demands the willing suspension of disbelief; good SciFi is a prediction. We aren’t likely to develop into sorcerers and magicians any time soon, but progress marches on: that’s why we have more computing power on our wrists these days than could be developed in a middle-sized room in the era of punch cards. That may be why the best science fiction authors are scientists themselves… not people with English and “multimedia” degrees like Kelly Robson.

Robson’s debut novel, Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach, is nominally SciFi. It’s received fawning reviews at The River and, believe it or not, at NYT. But I’m here to tell you that Robson missed the boat. Oh, some sort of post-apocalypse plot is there, there’s plenty of futuristic stuff going on, and there’s even time travel. The protagonist is even a modified human with six legs and ocular implants like a future version of Oculus Rift®. She’s Minh, a plague baby – whatever those are. She and her team, which includes Kiki – not a plague baby, a fat baby – travel back to Mesopotamia circa 2,000 BCE to study the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Just why they need to study the rivers is, unfortunately, not clear.

But back they go, and – of course – everything goes south. I’m willing to suspend some disbelief, but the notion that Bronze Age warriors can bring down a 23rd-century flying vehicle requires more suspension than the Golden Gate Bridge. Count me as an unbeliever.

The plot of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach reads like some sort of futuristic reality TV show, filled with the sort of back-stabbing and internecine strife fans of that rubbish have come to expect. Forgive me if I prefer realism to “reality.” The squabbling between team members, combined with the generational conflict slathered over the plot, just doesn’t work: I keep expecting them to vote someone off the island.

That’s not the only problem with the plot. Maybe it’s just me, but I quickly got tired of having to figure out what all of Robson's made-up terms meant: “plague baby” sort of makes sense, but WTF is a “fat baby”? I can figure out what a “skip” is from context or a “hell,” because I’ve read boatloads of SciFi.  Ditto, a “fake,” but should I have to? What the hell is a “biom”? And then there's, "Why are all of these future humans suddenly eight-legged?"

One of the few critical reviewers at the River has said of Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach that, “The author dumps science jargon, apparently fed to her, without any actual science.” Indeed, and it's especially irritating when you know the science Robson doesn't, such as the dynamics of fluvial systems.¹ Plus, there's Robson’s insistence on creating acronyms and initialisms for every damned thing (CEERD, TERN, ESSA…), which is frankly irritating. Worst of all, however, is that the plot is just boring. The book drones along for a couple hundred pages, then all hell breaks loose for a chapter or two, and then the plot just dies in mid-sentence. It Makes. No. Sense.

¹ Although no one asked, I have a Master of Science degree in sedimentology...

copyright © 2018-2022 scmrak